Assignment #2: Standing Jump

• Assigned: Thursday, Jan 15th, 2009
• Due: Wednesday, Jan 22nd at 1:00 PM

Resources:

• Muybridge human jump from a side view (taken from The Animator's Survival Kit)
• This week's Basic Guy rig - and all the scripts
• Dave's example character sheet for thumbnail drawing
• Dave's example pose "research" sheet (testing to see which pose works best for anticipation)
• Twinning explanation/example

Part 1: Standing Jump Planning

For this part of the assignment you will be creating a planning sheet for a standing jump using the specified key poses. You may do a jump with or without forward momentum. Also, no matter which jump you do, the feet must take-off from and land on the ground at the same time. Planning sheets make the entire animation process faster and easier; they are invaluable tools for visualizing and planning your motion even before you get into Maya. When drawing your planning sheets, you will want to try to make your poses as interesting as possible and avoid twinning. You can find an example of the poses we want you to draw from The Animator's Survival Kit HERE. You can find an example of a jump planning sheet by Derek HERE. Note that Derek's poses aren't the exact ones you will be doing. Also note that this is about the detail we are looking for. It just has to be enough to convey the pose and line of action.

What to do:

1. (OPTIONAL) Take video reference of yourself jumping forward from a standing position. If it is possible, jump as high as you can while also jumping forward, you will get much better movement in your arms and legs making it easier to see key poses and motion arcs for your planning sheets.
2. Draw out a planning sheet for the standing jump, using only the following poses:
   • Start and end with a neutral pose
   1. Anticipation (squash)
   2. Jump (stretch), contact with the ground
   3. Mid-air (squash)
   4. Fall (stretch), contract with the ground
   5. Recovery (squash)

Part 2: Standing Jump Posing

Now that you have a planning sheet, it's time to start posing. You will be using a version of the blue guy rig from last quarter, but with some of the controls/attributes that you will not need to worry about locked and hidden. This will help you to better focus on the poses themselves without worrying about some of the finer details.

• Since you won't need to do any facial animation for this assignment the face controls are disabled.
• We changed the finger controls to FK. Just use the normal rotate modifier to move them.
• The rig's arms are locked into FK this time. This is because in certain actions likes jumps and walks, it is much easier to do overlap and follow-through in the arms by using FK.
• There are some minor squash and stretch switches we disabled as well.

1. Download Basic_Guy_week2.zip and unzip the archive.
2. The actual rig file is in the Basic_Guy_week2\scenes
3. Move bgWin.mel from Basic_Guy_week2\scripts to My Documents\maya\2008\scripts
4. Move shelf_BasicGuy.mel from Basic_Guy_week2\shelves to My Documents\maya\2008\prefs\shelves
5. Move all the .dib files from Basic_Guy_week2\icons to My Documents\maya\2008\prefs\icons
6. Open the Basic Guy rig. There should be a shelf labeled "Basic Guy".

What to do:

1. Pose the blue guy rig directly from your planning sheet in an orthographic side view. There should only be the seven poses specified above (two of which are neutral). Set Maya to stepped mode. The poses should be in order with about 10 frames in between each pose; we're not worrying about timing. Also don't do any inbetween/break-down poses. Make these seven, particularly the inner five, as perfect as you can!
2. Draw CV curves over each of the poses indicating motion arcs. Just use the Create CV Curve Tool in the orthographic view you are posing from.
3. Give us two playblasts, with and without the motion arc curves visible, so we can review the poses.

Turn-in Checklist:

• Use .ma and not .mb
• Please name your files lastname_firstname_assignmentnumber_partnumber_filename.* (example: doe_john_a1_p2_character_ball.ma)
• For Part 1: (OPTIONAL) Reference videos.
• For Part 1: One planning sheet with only the seven specified poses (neutral, anticipation, jump, mid-air, fall, recovery, and neutral). Also turn in your "research" sheets (where you tried out different poses).
• For Part 2: Two playblasts from an orthographic side view in Maya. One with and one without the motion arcs visible. Don't worry about the jump's timing, but give each pose enough time for us to get a good look at them.
• For Part 2: One Maya file of your standing jump.