The end of Maya Springboard

Can hardly believe it, but the Maya Springboard is actually over! I've learned alot as you can see with the assignments I made and I'm real glad I participated. I feel ready now to start the main Animation Mentor course on 5 January of 2009. The Springboard did exactly what I wanted it to do. Make me feel more comfortable with the 3D software Maya and teach me a lot of cool new things I can use in future assignments.

Well since we have no more assignments comming up I won't be posting again till January when AM really begins. Waited so long for this and now it's just a few weeks away :)!!!!

But I still have to talk about the most recent and last assignment I made for the Springboard. Check it out!

For me this was the first real animation assignment and also the most fun! The beginning was easy blocking out the poses. This jump for example has 12 key poses. Can you spot them ? ;)

After blocking the hard part came. Creating breakdowns between the main keys. I did that on the second day. On the third day I started working on the inbetweens. Now that was hard for me, because I'm still trying to train my eye to find bad inbetweens. I'm still not happy with the landing, but I'm sure when the main course starts I'll be more experienced and know what to do to improve it. And today, day 4, I spent all my time on polishing the animation in the graph editor. So, make all the animation curves nice and smooth and make sure the animation didn't contain any ''hickups''. So basically make sure the jump has a nice arc going up and down.

I made another render here so you can see the jump from another perspective...

Alot of people are telling me that the animation is too short and they can't believe I've been working on it for 4 days. Well that's one of the bad things about animation. It's a very time consuming medium. Just a fun fact... Did you know; that on average, animators who work at Pixar/Dreamworks etc work 4 years to create about 1 minute of animation. Here's a small calculation to show you what I mean...

In one second of animation 24 different images flash by..so in 1 minute:
60*24= 1440 Now remember that's just 1 minute!! Imagine a feature film like madagaskar or Kung Fu Panda wich are about 90 minutes long. You'll get 1440*90= 129.600 individual ''drawings'' or images!!!

So yeah...this jump has a little over 80 frames and flashes by in not even 4 seconds...but that's animation. A VERY time consuming artform, that I just can't get enough of ;)