[Exercise 6: The Door's Stuck]

Here's the project file... Since I wasn't familiar with interpolation methods when I made this, the foot-slipping is prevented with extra keyframes. Hopefully you'll find it useful, though!

 

ex6.prj

[Exercise 6: The Door's Stuck]

Thanks! I tried really hard to get the timing right.

[Exercise 7: Can You Say That]

Name: Steve Wooster

 

Exercise Completed: Exercise 7

 

I tried to make KeeKat look a little shady with his posturing at the beginning, but instead of having him get angry, I chose to have him become disappointed.

 

ex7_custom.mov

Date Completed: 4/23/2007

[Exercise 6: The Door's Stuck]

Name: Steve Wooster

 

Exercise Completed: Exercise 6

 

It was difficult and time-consuming for me to make an animation that even resembled real movement... It took me 4 or 5 days to tweak things and I still haven't figured out how to get the timing/movement right for wiggling/pulling. Hopefully it'll get quicker/easier with practice?

 

ex6.mov

Date Completed: 4/19/2007

[Exercise 5: Take A Walk]

Name: Steve Wooster

 

Exercise Completed: Exercise 5

 

I really tried to give a animation a lot of follow-through, though perhaps it's a bit too much for a rabbit that's only walking and not running. Also, I took extra care to ensure that there is no foot-slipping. One problem I've noticed is that when it comes to the timeline splines, they don't really seem to loop, so the slopes of the curve at the first and last frames are entirely different. As a result, the rabbit's left-hand seems to jolt forward when the walk cycle loops. Does anybody know if it's possible to set the spline tangent without changing the interpolation method? I seem to remember seeing that some place, but I can't remember where...

 

ex5_custom.mov

Date Completed: 4/15/2007

[Exercise 4: It's a Pitch]

Name: Steve Wooster

 

Exercise Completed: Exercise 4

 

I modified the animation somewhat, and attempted to give the knight a little more sense of weight and follow-through. (Just out of curiosity, why do animators call it that instead of inertia?) I think there's still a problem with the head where it pauses before continuing forward... Also, I've noticed I have a hard time deciding on a speed that "feels" right. Either the hand looks too slow to throw the ball, or the body looks like it's moving too fast.

 

ex4_custom.mov

Date Completed: 4/14/2007

[Exercise 3: Move it]

Name: Steve Wooster

 

Exercise Completed: Exercise 3

 

For this exercise, I tried my best to copy the book's drawings as closely as possible:

 

Date Completed: 4/13/2007

[Exercise 2: Chorus Line]

Name: Steve Wooster

 

Exercise Completed: Exercise 2

 

ex2.mov

Date Completed: 4/13/2007

[Exercise 1: You're the Director]

Name: Steve Wooster

 

Exercise Completed: Exercise 1

 

 

Date Completed: 4/13/2007

[Welcome A:M Users!]

Thanks for the advice Rodney! I'm currently up to redoing exercise 6. I figure I'll post all the exercises at the same time once I complete them.

 

Hi Rheanne!

[Mirroring a time-range]

I'm assuming you mean the button to the right of the play button? That doesn't do what I need, because the second half of the animation needs to be mirrored along the X-axis. (the animation I've done is a single step forward, and a full cycle is two steps with different feet - the same as exercise 5)

[Mirroring a time-range]

I'm trying to do exercise 5, except I'm customizing the animation some. Since I have many keyframes, I'm looking for a convenient way to quickly mirror a range of time without having to cut/paste-mirror each frame, so I can quickly and easily preview the animation after making minor tweaks to it. Does anybody know how to do this? The closest I've come, is that I've figured out how to copy/paste a range of control-points in the timeline window. Thanks for any help!

[Displaying Keyed Bones]

I'm going through the animation exercises, and one of the biggest things that would be helpful to me is if there was a way to visualize which bones are keyed when. Something like, if a bone has any sort of key during the current frame, it changes color. You might even have the color depend on what kinds of keys exist during the current frame (translation, rotation, etc). It would make it so much easier to find and delete keys, and to figure out which bones are keyed in the current frame. Does anybody know if such a feature exists? Thanks for any help!

 

Edit: After doing some searching, I found some instructions on how to set this up in V14, but they don't seem applicable to my copy of A:M... Is there any way to do it for V13?

[Welcome A:M Users!]

Hi, my name is Steve. I got A:M this Monday and have been enjoying learning it. I did "Anyone Can Animate" before finding out about TAOA:M certification, so I hadn't saved anything except the walk-cycle and stuck door exercises... on the bright side, I bet the exercises will go much quicker the second time through, and it'll be good practice for me. I'm learning A:M as part of a potential internship, but I'm also looking forward to trying to use it for some personal projects too. For a long time, I've had a huge phobia of high-end modeling software despite wanting to be able to construct models/animations. I started to learn such software twice, but both times I ended up very frustrated. Fortunately, this hasn't at all been the case with A:M and so far it's extremely easy to learn.