Week 4 – Exaggeration, 3D and Life Drawing
Week 4 of the character animation course has finished, and here’s the result of my work since. Before the week started, I’d read into my tutor’s notes about what we were going to learn. Steve mentioned various animation principles such as overshooting, anticipation and exaggeration. In the time I spent learning animation myself, I’d become somewhat aware of these ideas, and had been trying to put these into practice. With that in mind, the first video below showcases an attempt to use overshoot and anticipation in the form of a sword swing (using Link from Zelda’s Breath of the Wild).
If I had to critique it, I’d say the sword swing feels a little on the gentle side, and you don’t get the full sense of weight behind it. But generally I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, and stayed relatively on-model.
The exercise we got this week was to animate a dive, whether from a springboard or something else entirely. Steve showed us an old animated cartoon from 1946 Northwest Hounded Police, by Tex Avery featuring the character of Droopy. He really wanted us to look at how we could cheat animation, making full use of exaggerated movements not possible in reality.
In particular, double take was something that appealed to me – a more comical approach to exaggerate the eyes and facial features of a second glance at something. You can see my usage across two different animations (above and below), once again featuring Steve since I enjoy using his character design.
I saw many of my peers take alternative approaches to the diving animation exercise, so I decided to have a second go at animating a “dive”. Using the famous design of Lupin III (based on Hirotaka Marafuji’s take for part 6), I altered some of the keyframes and ending to make a smoother ending than my previous effort. I have to say I’m very proud of this more recent attempt, and think it’s more successful in motion compared to the previous one. I also tinkered about with the camera folder in Clip Studio Paint, to have the camera follow Lupin for a more dynamic-looking outcome. Of course, none of this is relevant for the exercise, but it was a nice touch nonetheless.
Alongside all this 2D work, I got a chance to work with 3D using Maya. Admittedly, I was less happy using Maya than I imagined ,partly because we don’t have a teacher present in person to help us out immediately since it has to be delivered online, but mainly because I found the software somewhat counterintuitive to animation. Setting and moving keyframes was more difficult than it should have been, and getting the character to move limbs felt a little more complicated given each limb has its own rig, meaning you have to be aware of all limbs at the same time. I imagine it’s my ego as a 2D animator talking when I complain, but it would have been nice if Maya had easier controls to animate with. Aside from that, it was nice to see the character jump and sink at various points.
To end off the week, we had two life drawing sessions of different approaches. The first (below) focused on emotion and expression through body language moreso than the usual anatomy. Furthermore, 7 minutes were given rather than the usual 30 second – 3 minute approach, which gave us more time to focus on detail (though I’m not sure I quite got there).
Lastly, the usual session of life drawing ran, this time with Morgan Barbour (and her dog Reginald, who often blocked the foot). Only stayed for half the session, but I do feel an increasing awareness of anatomy, of proportions and slightly looser linework than previous weeks.
Next week will involve weight and physics it seems, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.