Animation Assignment #1- DOT

Animation Assignment #1- DOT

Develop your idea
Make your DOT do something... it can turn into something, go somewhere, or... dot dot dot...

1st Play with toonator.com and develop your Dot animation idea. Try 3-5 variations of your dot on "Toonator" and post a least 3 to the Class Sharing Space. Then select your best idea and turn it into a flip book...

Flip Book:
You will be given a little flip book/note pad and a pencil. Some pages of the flip book may have graphics, some maybe blank. You can incorporate the graphics into the animation or not.

• Save the first page for your name and title, but do that last.
• Best to start from back to front.
• Consider what you want your dot to do. Choose your favorite/best from your Toonator idea development. Maybe ask some of your classmates to help you decide from you top 3 ideas.
• You can alter your concept from your digital draft if it works better for your Dot concept.
• Draw a dot on the last page.
• Then flip a page and draw the dot again, but alter the placement, size, or shape of the dot slightly.
• Flip the page again and continue until your dot does something or goes somewhere.
• To make the movement slower, keep the changes very tight/close to previous. Alternately, to make the movement more rapid, draw the dot further from page to page.
• Have fun!
• You can use color too!
• Be creative! 
• Remember that you have no limits other than your imagination. And the length of pages in your flip book.
• Draw minimum of 50 pages...
• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zDtAjQpT3Ofr_pkD3r1pZsPUueuCQCZrB9dGz0Q_pmQ/edit?usp=sharing 

Bone Tool- Weight Paint

To learn about "Weight paint". This is a mode (Like object mode) where you can select each individual bone and paint the area on the mesh you want to be affected by each bone. 

As long as it's part of the same mesh as the body, select the head bone in pose mode, right click on the mesh, go into weight paint, paint the hat, then select that bone in pose mode and see if it moves now. That's kind of a quick explanation, but this tutorial probably does a better job:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_sfan8OchA

Some of the best tutorials under the animation section of blendercookie.com. Watching these are pretty inspiring because they show just how in-depth one can go into rigging and animation. I've seen everything from rigging pistons to jumping balls to spiders.

Animating Gingerbread men tutorials. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwTyGvog27I

Bone Tool Tutorials

Basic Bone Tool-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcNGeIV0BsU

More Advanced Bone Tool-

Rigging a snake with Bone Tool

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFs2lTu-etI

check out rigging on BlenderCookie.com
http://cgcookie.com/blender/2011/12/12/blender-introduction-to-character-rigging/

Blender Tutorials

Here are a 5 tutorials that I recommend. I tried adding them to the blog but the original email inviting me to edit is broken.

Mirror modifier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjSmkHnGrlA

Mesh-Modelling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1DnYxd3iTw

Modelling from reference images: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXA3so_FUF8

Materials: http://youtu.be/n182T7ne6PE?t=1m8s

Lighting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF2ugsuyHu8

Also a note that many tutorials are now working with "Cycles" which is a different render engine inside blender. For the context of this class, students should realize the difference so they don't end up watching tutorials that feature this. The render engine we will be using is called "Blender Render" and is the program's default. 

For any keeners, here are the sites that I go to for more in-depth learning:

https://cgcookie.com/blender/category/tutorials/

http://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/

http://blenderartists.org/forum/index.php

Flash Storyboards

Include the following in your storyboard:

1. Development of character- Self-portrait. Main character has a resemblance of you, take on attributes of you. Supporting characters are optional.
2. Background(s)- Can be simple, or detailed. Use more than one scene.
3. Strong narrative: establish space and character(s), create a conflict, and then resolve.
4. Include at least 3 perspectives (variety in the frame, use different angles, change the distance to subject, POV or point of view)
5. Use a Cut-Away- where you switch your frame to draw attention to something and/or lapse time more rapidly.
6. Consider compositional framing techniques to make the frame more interesting and appealing.

More blank storyboards are in the hand in box at the front of the class.
Storyboards are due Friday, Dec. 5th.

Mini-Flash Animation

Check list for your First Flash Animation:

Create a simple subject or a ball. Animate it using the following techniques:

• Frame by frame animation
• Motion Tween
• Scale Tween
• Colour Tween
• Transform Tween
• Shape Tween
• Ease

[You can animate the background too.] Create a simple story and incorporate your new Flash skills.
Publish it and save to the Flash Mini Animation Share folder.

Storyboarding: planning your visual story

Brainstorm-
Before you start story boarding your animation, you need to brain storm,  write down your ideas in point form, doodle,
Write a Script-
Then write it out a script could be in paragraph or point form. It may be short, but it is a starting point to organize your thoughts.

Storyboard-
Then try to visually and roughly draw your idea in a storyboard. The essence of the story board it to organize your ideas, and to use it as a guide when putting your final piece together.

Some Storyboard Suggestions:

• Keep it simple, don't worry if you are not a great artist, you don't have to go into detail.
• Don not draw all of the frames. Only draw out key changes, significant changes in movement, or the story line.
• Draw in pencil, 
• Sometimes drawing a grid will give your frames depth.
• Give the basic essence of your story- beginning, middle/conflict, end resolutions

Storyboard from Wall-e