Week 8

• Notes

  Horse trot with extension animation blocking to be handed in.

  Lecture/Demo

  Introduce the Final project. Animation must be 8-20 sec long

  Activity

  Select Final Assignment and begin planning.

  Assignment

  Pick your final animation assignment. It must be 8-20 sec long and can be one of the following topics. 1. Character Acting/Dialogue: two characters acting and re-acting to each other. Have planning ready for next class.
•  

Horse Shaking Reference

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Beg78BWUW_g

Week 7

• 
  
  

  Notes

  Horse trot cycle will be handed in at the end of this class.

  Horse trot with extension will be handed in next class.

  Lecture/Demo

  Techniques for getting fresh eyes. Flipping video, playing backwards and other tricks to find the pops and hitches in your animation.

  Activity

  Group critique of Trot cycles.

  Assignment

  Based on feedback, refine your cycle and extended elements. Finish animation for next class, extension has to be in blocking for main controller and feet controllers, cycle has to be polished.

 Hey guys I think I left my hard drive at class anybody happen to see it?

Week 6

This week we will be adding offset and overlap to the horse animation, and moving it forwards along a ground plane. We will also be discussing our ideas for extending the animation.

• Horse going from trot to canter with gait change
• Horse going from trot to walk with gait change
• use reference, analyze it, and interpret as necessary to get a believable performance 

Copy the up and down translation from the COG_CTRL to the hips rearTORSO_CTRL and chest frontTORSO_CTRL. Make sure you past it relative to the value at frame 1. In my case it was -.823. You can save a key for the y tran on frame 1, and type in the value in the stats window in the graph editor.

Now when you paste the curve, it will past it relative to this value, instead of pasting it beginning at the default value of 0.

The chest is carryng the weight of the head and neck, so scale down the amount of up and down translation in the chest, compared to the hips.

Using the graph editor, add overlap to the action. Grab the chest, front feet and leg controllers, head and neck controllers and slide the animation 2 frames later. Grab just the neck and head, and finish offsetting the animation in overlapping waves from the base of the neck to the head.

Now using the compress fetlock controller, add the sense of weight being compressed into the hoof as the weight goes onto each foot.

Add some side movement to the feet. Look at reference closely from the front and back views.

Double check that the feet are moving in equal increments along the ground.

Using the method demonstrated in class, move the horse forwards along a ground plane.

• make sure the feet are moving back in even increments
• move the cycle forwards along a ground plane

Take your trot cycle, and move it forwards. Create a simple render of your animation with the horse trotting forwards, on a ground plane with a shadow to show the foot contact. Add several behaviors to break up the cycle and add spirit to the horse animation.

Examples:

• add a kick
• head tosses
• looking to the left and right
• tail flick

Put the rendered movie file in the drop off folder for the beginning of next week's class. Your animation should be between 80 to 120 frames in length.

WEEK 5 ADDING TWIST AND TILTING TO THE HIPS AND CHEST, X TRANSLATION TO THE FEET (FRONT AND BACK VIEWS)

Add the twist (yrot) to the hips first. Then check the z tran. curve for the foot. You can scale this curve to extend the leg.
Hint: When adding rotations to the hips, the tilt and twist happen when the feet contact and push off the ground, and not in mid-air.

Once you get the tilt and twist of the hips, copy these curves to the chest, and scale by -1 to reverse the curves.

Check the footfalls so that the feet contact the ground and leave the ground on the frames corresponding in the thumbnail sketches. Compare your keys and breakdowns to the thumbnail sketches. For now keep the animation on the main foot controller.

Add x translation to the feet (from front and rear view). Check reference.

Copy the up and down y translation from the root into the hips and chest, and remove it from the root.

Create a nice pose for the head and neck.

Add some x rotation in the hips and chest. Copy the x rotations up the neck. (Tone them down if need be, we will offset the curves once blocking is complete.)