Cubey's Revenge

The animation principles that we had to include in this exercise, along with the ones already utilised, were the anticipation and overlap techniques. This invloves movements that the character makes leading up to and after the main movement. For example the character crouches down before springing into a leap, and bends to absorb the force after landing before returning to an upright position. Not particularly concise in my explanation but hopefully lucid enough that its not totally nonsensical.

This is my 2D attempt, it just went on and on, i kept having to fetch more clean paper from the cabinet saying to myself "I'll finish it in the next 20 frames..." only to run out of paper again. In the end it came in at a monstrous 58 frames. Though when i played it back at 24fps it was a little too speedy so I changed the playback speed in the software to 15fps which felt more natural. While the little Cubey moves well the larger Cubey lacks anticipation on his leap. He crouches but then he just lifts up without stretching upward first. Also it feels painfully short considering how long it took me to do 58 frames.



I thought I'd try and step it up with the 3D this week and put a lot more time into the task at hand. After my persp camera in Maya screwed itself up (probably with my help) Georg showed me how to create a new one and this lead to me animating it and creating an epic sweep to better encompass the different parts within the scene. Something I've noticed in other peoples 3D animations is the speed at which characters move, it sometimes can be a bit sluggish, so I thought I'd try and add a kind of snappy elasticity to my own animation. I think maybe the reason peoples animations are slower is because they are longer because of it so it looks like more work, the quality suffers because of this misconception. More rendering time too...
Anway here it is, im super proud of it, so before anyone says all show no go, watch the animation closely: