Tuesday, 16 September 2014

Back to Basics - Squirrel Animation

I was halfway through another shot using the JACK rig from Animsquad when I felt like I was getting swamped with the technicalities of Maya and losing sight of the principles of animation.

So I've put that animation on hold for now and started work on a new project using the Squirrels rig from animation mentor:



Before I decided what to do I looked at some progress reels from Animation Mentor students. I wanted to see what type of animations they were doing to get the basics down. There were loads of really nice walk cycles, a few pantomime shots and a couple of bouncing ball exercises. I noticed how energetic and cartoony the animation was and thought it would be interesting to try and go for the same style. It would also be a nice change from the slightly more restrained animation I was doing with JACK. 

The 'ball with a tail' exercise felt like a good one to do as it encompassed most of the qualities I wanted to get better at such as fun timing, rhythm, squash and stretch and personality.

The idea I came up with was to have an acorn fall out of a tree and then have the squirrel chase after it. It's not quite finished yet but below are the progress of my arcs and timing of the animation:




 Rough sketch of the overall idea and arcs I wanted.





I then filmed video reference and animated some initial arcs. The reference was valuable to help get a sense of timing and rhythm to the squirrel jumping around the tree  (I pretended my fingers were the squirrel!).





 Refined arcs and timing. I removed some the of the jumps as it all felt a bit too frenetic.






Final arcs and timing of the shot. Quite a bit of difference from when I started.


Should be a few more days until the first draft of the animation is done :)
In the meantime here is some animation of Scrat from Ice Age that I took inspiration from: 


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