Assignment #8:
The Sit - Bringing It All Together

Assigned: Friday, November 17th, 2017
Due: Friday, December 1st @ 10:00 AM

Resources:

Sitting down is a complicated action. You will need to study your reference and figure out how the body shifts weight. You will also be required to incorporate emotion and acting into your character for this assignment. What your character does and they feel is completely up to you. However, the action should be clear and the emotion easily read. Start your character in a standing position and end in a sitting position with acting throughout; be creative!

Do not spend too much time modelling extra props. Create rough models or just use primitives instead; the focus is on the motion and acting in your work.

This is an ambitious multi-week project, so remember to start early! And have fun with it!

Part 1: Sit Layout

Planning and Layout

Summarize what you plan to animate by preparing a two sentence description of your sit's story. One sentence will need to describe the personality of the character you will be animating and the other sentence will describe the circumstances surrounding the sit. Include the video reference that inspired your story.

Draw a planning sheet of the key story telling poses then apply them in Maya using a copy of the Corruption rig. The important thing for this week is laying out your animation. Pose the key poses ("golden poses") in stepped mode from your planning sheet. Don't worry about the extremes, just make sure your story reads. Animation layout is meant to cover the broad strokes. It gives you a chance to catch any major problems before you advance too far in your motion. Think about shot framing, how far your character needs to travel across the screen when moving, how many steps need to be taken, if your golden poses read, and if there are even enough key poses to properly convey the story.

You will be animating from a single, fixed camera angle. The camera should be about 3/4 to the front and your character's full body should be in view throughout the entire animation. The resolution of your final output will need to be 1280x720, however you can work in 640x360 for now (as it's the same aspect ratio). All of your motion arcs and silhouettes will be relative to this camera. Don't be afraid to exaggerate your poses such that they only look good from this view. However, remember that you still need to pay attention to weight shifts on all sides, as those shifts will still affect how your character moves through space.

When done, email your staff the layout so you can recieve feedback to incorporate into Part 2:

Part 2: Sit Extremes

After three phases:

  1. Improve your key/layout poses based on any feedback you recieved from the staff during check-ins. and your peers.

  2. Create facial expressions to supplement the readability of your poses. Choose expressions that enhance and make the narrative of your sit more clear. They don't have to always be an exaggerated form of the six cardinals. Your expressions will most likely be some mild degree of or variant of them (such as the "sly" smile, "greedy" smile, "tired" smile, etc). It really depends on what your story calls for.

  3. Begin filling in your extremes. Also remember to continue blocking in facial expressions. As you create these poses you may find that timing and positioning may need to be adjusted. This is completely fine, especially at this early stage. You may find it helpful to periodically get feedback from your peers as you advance your motion.

    Just pose the extents of your character's actions, kind of like the bouncing ball high/lows or the jump poses. Don't worry about doing too much with breakdowns.

To unlock the face rig in your existing Maya files select Corruption's top con and set the "P Face Anim Vis" and "S Face Anim Vis" attributes to 1.

Note that the face rig is separate from the body rig. When you select all anims with the Ctrl+Shift+a menu, you will be selecting either all of the body anims or all of the face anims.

Motion Check-In for Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Part 2: Sit Extremes