Animation Exercises to do. Exercise #5 "Bounce."
mmoir
Posts: 821
Hey guys,
It has been a long time since we did an animation challenge so I thought we could start these up again. We only did 4 challenges previously Week 1, Week 2, Week 3 and Week 4 . So, here is the new weekly animation challenge. The theme is "Bounce"
You can do your own idea or just try and recreate the attached animation(I found on youtube) the best you can . I will model the scene and upload a similar carrara file for you to animate with.
Rules or rough guidelines
1. Animation should be based on the theme “Bounce” Whatever this means to you.
2. Animation length . No longer than 10 seconds.
3. Animated with Carrara as the main tool.
4. Feel free to ask for help if you run into problems, this is supposed to be a learning tool to improve your animation/Carrara skills.
5. If you need a simple model , just ask . Someone might just model it for you.
5. You have 1 week to finish your animation.
6. Post your animation to your preferred site (youtube, vimeo etc.)
7. If you want you can post your carrara file so others can download and learn from the file.
Have fun with this.
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Comments
Here is the carrara file zipped up and the image of the carrara scene. It may not seem like a difficult animation to do but I think it is harder than it looks If you want to animate this is a great place to start. . I think using solid color balls would be better to start with as the balls with stripes introduce alot of complexity.
Just grabbed it... now to see what I can accomplish in a week. Guess I'll now need to creat a YouTube channel. :)
Here is my attempt at the animation. I did a rough pass and a bit of a clean up pass to get this result.
Mike, Thanks for posting your anim... I was wondering if the anim should be true to the original or our own interpretation!
I've run into a problem caused myself, of course, so put it to bed for last night. I didn't like the eye being on both ends so instead re-designed it as a vertex obj with shader domains for the stripes and eye... no problem. Later I wasn't happy with the angle of the blue ball vertex so angled it to peer up at the grn ball and be visible, may have done this in the VM at frame where it stopped... will have to see where I went wrong tonight. Oh another reason for my blue ball being a vertex object is so I can add some morphs to it. I know I'm making it harder than needed... but this is a fun project. :)
The posted animation is a guide so your own spin on it is fine, my animation is quite different from the one I posted from youtube. I know sometimes it is hard to come up with an idea so having something to follow is easier.
Great... Things have worked out fairly well so far... ready to shove big Greenie ball off cube... after adding a bunch of keyframes which I'll need to adjust for timing, they are all crammed into 4 secs. I'm hoping I can just plop in a keyframe in between others and make adjustments if needed. Also haven't added any morphs and hope that I can just add them to object at start and they will be available throughout the anim. Last thing, if there is time, I want to mess with some shaders on stationary objects... hope you don't mind. :)
A problem I did have last night was with trying to turn the Spin modifier off at the correct spot. I'd moved and spun it, the blue ball, to a certain position... looking up at what the Time was I entered that setting for it to turn off. Unfortunately it stopped before the keyframe so had to mess with revs per second as well as seconds in order to get it to stop at the correct location.
Also before starting I set up a SoftBody modifier and have "use collision detection" on. I'm sure that I need some practice with Softbody settings since I've not seen any benefit in adding that... yet.
Luckily I bought Phil Wilke's, PhilW, Animation in Carrara Video Tutorials so will likely learn a lot from it.
wgdjohn,
It is your animation you can change what every you want with the shaders.
The spin modifier is a little confusing. For figuring out the Start and Stop times enter values that are a percent instead of frame number. Lets say your annimation is set to 24 fps and you look at your timeline and decide to stop your Spin modifier at 1:06(1sec , 6 frame), if you input 1.06 into the modifier stop time it wont stop where you want. If you enter a percentage instead , the 6th frame of 24frames in percentage terms is 6/24 or 1/4 or 0.25 . So, entering 1.25 in the Stop time should get what you want.
Look forward to seeing your animation.
Thanks for explaining... it makes sense now.
Mike, I'm nearly done... here is what I have so far in the scene file. Still have a bit of tiny adjustments to do. Want to:
Is there an easy way to copy a keyframe? I've been moving the scrubber and then moving the object and setting any Motion setting back to the previous keyframe... a bit of a bother but gets the job done.
Oh great... I saved/closed and re-opened the file and all the motion for the Green ball is now gone. I've no idea what the zip below contains... should have Green ball hitting the floor and bouncing off screen... will have to check tomorrow... don't even want to open any earlier versions and have mess them up.
Hope I have time to play with a few shader settings... don't think I'll get to any morphs for this one.
You can copy an existing keyframe by using Alt-Drag on an existing key, I use it all the time. And if you just need a bit of squash and stretch, you can use the scaling tool rather than making morphs.
Your keyframing should be saved with the scene, it is very odd that the motion has disappeared.
Here is a quick WIP just to reassure Mike that I am paying attention. Will do a better one and replace. Click to view.
Diomede - it is a start but it looks to me that the ball is kind of floating rather then bouncing, some timing adjustments should sort that out. Things can happen in real life a lot quicker than many animations portray.
Hey , I looked at the carrara file and you are doing a great job on this. I like the motion you have done so far.
.. For the green ball you have "animated" unchecked so the green ball won't animate. All you have to do is check the Animated box below the "Visible" checkbox in the Properties panel/General tab for the green ball.
Diomede, great start on this. Like Phil suggested a small change in timing could make a big difference. Maybe make the last bounce quicker and not so high.
Phil... Thanks, that will save a huge amount of time. Will that little plus sign go away or remain to mark any keyframes added with Alt-Drag? I've barely started on your Animation tutorial... will eventually get back to it.
diomede... was thinking you might be lurking in the shadows. :) Your squish certainly looks better than mine... perhaps I over inflated my balls.
Mike... Doh! .. Thanks for pointing that out... don't remember unchecking it. Thanks also for complimenting my motion... means a lot to me.
I've got the Green ball offscreen in 7secs... now I can work on Little Blue again... I'm wanting to create Blue's excitement and have a quick fade to black... going to see if light settings can be changed for the latter... if not I'll add a plane with invisible shader and use that for the fade out at end.
When you Alt-Drag a keyframe it just produces another keyframe, it is not linked to the first one. When you say "little plus sign", I think you may have two keys that are very close together and that is almost always not a good thing! If you zoom into the timeline, you should be able to see more clearly, and if one was set by accident then just delete the unwanted key.
That explains why when I drag the one with the plus sign there was another under it... musta got carried away trying to create a copy.
We had this kind of exercice a few years ago on Carrarators, my first idea was to try the physic engine to do that and I have seen very quickly that that was a crazy idea!
The graph editor was the best solution for this challenge...
http://www.bond3d.byethost18.com/index.php?topic=22.msg110#msg110
By Golly... I might be done. Check HERE or Below and see what you think. I'm open to criticism. You might notice what appears like a wood texture on the right hand wall near the corner... there is none... I suspect that it is reflections off the reflective cube in the scene.
Excellent, John!
Criticism... not necessary, all the story is in the clip and it's very well done!
Thank DUDU!
wgdjohn - great fun animation, well done!
wgdjohn, this is a great animation. Nicely done.
Dudu, I like very much how you had a reflective wall to make it appear as if he knocing ball to someone else. You definitly have character animation licked... while I struggle to work on a simple static pose.
Phil.. Mike... the top two Carrara artists, IMO... you're making me
Thanks very much!
wdgjohn, that's greatt. Love the way the little ball seems to look around!
Thanks Tango... he's an excited little ball on a sugar high. :)
Great animation, John! Balls have their character traits and faces!
Why thanks... I even impressed myself a bit... especially since it's been 4+ years since I last animated anything.
Note to All: The AVI player in the Carrara's Render room is messed up, at least for me. I set it to loop and hit Play button... each time it looped a different unwanted result showed. It also didn't play properly with loop off. I closed the player window and opened the file with a different Player and everything was fine... what a relief that was.
Hi John,
Late to the game here, but as @Vyusur mentioned above, your animation had a lot of character. Very nice!
I'm not ready for animation yet, but you are giving me something to shoot for down the road.