Design for Animation

WEEK 1

During the first week, I was tasked with creating a squirrel and animating it hopping off from one branch to another. The character creation of the squirrel had to be life like, however it was to be interpreted into our own designs and so I created this. I sketched a few animals I found on the internet just to improve my skill on drawing animals. I researched on plenty of squirrels, looking at various images and watching videos of them running around. I wanted to create a simplified version of my squirrel character so that it wouldn't be so complicated for me when i go to animate my squirrel character.

Here is the animation of my squirrel. In this animation, I have included some forms of the principles of animation including; Anticipation and Secondary Action. For anticipation, I edited in my squirrel moving back so that it visualises the squirrel ready to pounce. Near to the end of the animation, the squirrel builds up anticipation for another pounce and exits off screen. For secondary action, I animated both twigs to bounce and spring back into place when the squirrel added weight to both of the objects. Similarly to this, I also animated the squirrels tail moving around during the animation. 

WEEK 2

Commencing week 2, I had to catch up on my rigging skills. I started off by creating joints for my humanistic body starting with both right and left legs, creating the hip, stomach, chest and neck, and then branching off both right and left arms. I have had previous experience with rigging a skeleton so I remembered to parent and child the joints together. All of my joints all connected to the hip which is the main parent. 

To make the process much easier for me, I named all of the joints I created by their according body parts in the outliner. I also added a Nurbs Circle in both shoulders and elbows on my character to experiment on a different form of rigging. 

During the painting process, whenever I had finished painting a section I moved onto a different part and the old section would disappear. To overcome this, I had to unbind and rebind the skin and the skeleton back together and whilst doing that I would delete the history in nodes and somehow this worked but only for a short time. Perhaps when I added Nurbs into the joints it could have messed up the paint weight skin but I'm not too sure on how this even happened.   

WEEK 3/4

During week 3 and 4, I learned how to create and rig a working arm. To start creating the arm I had to start off with drawing straight lines for both Upper arm and forearm on a single layer. Once this was completed, I added two circles into the design, one for the elbow and the other for wrist. 

Here is the finished video of my arm pointing. I have got to say, this was one of my favourite things to create and animate on Harmony. I am not a big fan of the whole rigging process, however once you have gotten your head around the whole nodes and how the joints are all connected, you can make some very good animations from just rigging.

WEEK 5

In the final week, I had to create an animation on Harmony in which a head was turning. I also had to implement a facial expression on the head moving both eyes and mouth. The full aim for the end of this project was to have a turning head, moving eyes and mouth in an animation.