Bazookas: ANM302 – Week 12

I like to blow things up. Maybe it's because when I grew up the Cold War was still on and all we had to play with were war toys. Maybe it's because I used to stay up late to watch the Muppets on the Ed Sullivan Show and the skit would inevitably end with something exploding (or Kermit getting eaten my a monster – I had nightmares!). In any event, I have chosen the explosion effect in Maya to be the main point of my final project in this class. To that end, I intend to animate an generic character rig, taking a bazooka, firing it at a small trailer (yes, that's something from my childhood too – my parents would drag me on camping trips in our trailer – I hated it!), causing the trailer to explode into a million pieces with a giant fireball. Fun, huh? So I have to model the bazooka, model the missile, model the trailer, animate the character and the missile, create a smoke trail for the missile, make the glass in the window of the trailer shatter when the missile hits it, make the trailer shatter into a million pieces while its associated bits go flying, and create a giant fireball to go along with all of it. Whew! Hopefully I haven't bitten of more than I can chew. We'll see...

Inspiration: ANM201 – Week 12

This may sound strange, but I get some of my best ideas while in the shower. Perhaps it's the mindless activity of washing that allows my mind to wander, or maybe it's the invigorating spray of the water, either way something brilliant inevitably comes to me there. Yesterday it was an idea for animating a scene from my Sophomore film project – which will be my final project in this class. Originally, the film was to have been hand-drawn but after estimating production time at nearly a year, I knew that was out of the question. My adviser suggested doing the animation in After Effects with the puppet pin tool. That's a great idea, but it veers heavily away from the look I wanted with hand-drawn and it's rough boiling holds. Of course I can simply pre-compose a boiling hold for all the parts of the character in AE, and them animate them with rotation and puppet pins, but the motion will still be smooth from keyframe to key frame. That's when inspiration hit me. To achieve the “jerkiness” of hand-drawn animation what I'm going to do is “jump cut” the pieces to move them. In other words, for each drawing of an arm moving up, I'm going to insert a separate pre-composed boiling hold of the arm. This should give me the roughness I'm looking for. I can then use the puppet pin tool to shape the generic pieces into whatever form I need at the time. We'll give this a try, see how it looks, and more importantly – how long it takes. Next semester is going to go very fast and I want to be done with the film in time for its premier...

Explosions: ANM302 – Week 11

This week I'm working on a series of tutorials about explosions. In fact, by the end, I will have blown up a gas station in a huge fireball, and ignited the two gas pumps after taking them out with the debris field/shock wave. I absolutely love this!!! Building an explosion is an extension of creating fire in Maya, it uses the same principles of fuel and temperature and incandescence and such but in different combinations. There a lots of very subtle variations that have to be tweaked to get it to look just right – other wise you just have a big blob of mushy looking stuff that really doesn't look like an explosion at all. It's tough, but I'm enjoying it. In fact I might just use this as the basis for my final project. We'll see. In the meantime, I am reminded of famous words of John Candy from Second City TV: “She blowed up! She blowed up real good!”

Emotion: ANM201 – Week 11

To tell a story properly, you have to make your audience engrossed in it – get them to willingly suspend their disbelief. One of the best ways to do that is to have your characters placed in situations and act in believable, empathetic ways, that will evoke and emotional response. Remember, the best art is that which evokes and emotional response and that especially goes for animation. This week, we've been given the spec to create a 10 to 30 second animation in After Effects that expresses an emotion. The easiest way out of this one would be to show despair or sadness – it's simple to evoke that by playing a little sad music and and showing someone standing over a grave. But I want to try something harder. Fear. Well, more specifically terror and I think I know how. A slow reveal, accurate sound effects, and a sudden and abrupt ending should do the trick. Now, let us see if I can bring off the terror of an astronaut's last moments in deep space...

Fire: ANM302 – Week 10

Richard Pryor once said, “Fire is inspirational!” Of course, he was speaking of the time that he set his head ablaze while freebasing cocaine, but the gift of Prometheus really is inspirational. That's one of the reasons I've chosen to do the tutorials on fire this week. As I keep repeating through this blog, I love simulations, and using fluid mechanics to simulate a fire is, well, just plain cool. So, I'm working my way through the concepts of fuel, incandescence, temperature, ignition points and such in hopes of gleaning some understanding of how to make fire look real in Maya. It's a bit of a daunting task, but I'm up for it. Let's see if I can strike the flint just right and make a nice roaring fire!

The Puppet Pin: ANM201 – Week 10

So this week we are learning about the elusive “Puppet Pin” tool. This is something that I heard of back when I first learned Adobe After Effects, but never had the need or opportunity to use it – until now. As I understand it, the tool allows you to set what amount to joints in a solid bit-mapped image, and gives you the power to transform the image at those points as if you had run a series of bones with joints through it. It's seems to be a bit like rigging bones in Maya. Mind you it's going to be easier since it's in 2D and not 3D, but the problems of distorting the “rig” will probably still exist. This is going to be a big help to me, since I'm hoping to use it in my Sophomore film project (it will save me more than 6 months worth of work if it does), so needless to say I'm looking forward to learning this new tool.