…I might have gotten a little carried away. In retrospect, I wish I’d included this gag in the story for the final animation. But on its own, it makes a decent retaliation against all the frustration this sheep put me through this semester! Muahahaa!

(They look a little like rocks…But they’re definitely bags of wool. So, he’ll be okay. Probably.)

> Click to play that thang.

(In this case, meant to convey the sheer tiredness of the moment, whilst demonstrating how very glad I am to have this finished, and being fairly satisfied with the way it all turned out - despite a few lingering annoyances with my own Maya-limitations keeping several things from looking just the way I’d wanted. Methinks I need to do a little studying over Christmas break.)

That is all.

(Also, musical number is from incompetech.com)

> Click here for video

> Shed alone movie

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The style here reminds me of something…probably a long-repressed memory of claymation theatre or some such thing from childhood…but I can’t think what. Anyway, the texturing-mostly for the sheep- still needs a bit more work to make the UV mapping line up correctly. And the wool/sweater textures may be way too subtle at the moment. But I’m fairly pleased with how the inanimate objects turned out..especially the sack and the doors. Also, I think I will change the texture of the shed at some point…it looks like a stucco brick at the moment, which doesn’t really make much sense.

(Photo/textures, when used, are from cgtextures.com…a really good resource site)

> Click for turnaround:

Click here for movie:

Link to movie

Once I finally got the feet to stop floating, the rest of the alterations and tweaks went much smoother. There’s still something ‘off’ about the hip movement, I think, but overall it seems to work. I have yet to try the reverse-foot kinematics shown in class; I expect these would be more convincing.

<two movies: the whole character and a slight close-up >

(Click on the pics)

I took the previous animation exercise and turned him into one of those cheesy ‘drinking bird’ novelties you see sometimes…although the weight is more unbalanced here than in the real toy, it still seems to tip pretty convincingly.

This part of the exercise was done last, after I understood how to make the graph editor do what I wanted…and it’s a good thing I saved it ’till the end, as it was much trickier to tweak the easing and timing on the bobbing motion to make it look like the weight was actually shifting and balancing itself. It isn’t perfect, but I think it works well.

(Click on the pic)

With the second ball, I played more with the curve handles and finer adjustments/easing for the bounce motion, but didn’t do the squash/stretch here.

The third ball incorporated squash/stretch (possibly a bit exaggerated) and learning how to break and weight tangents in the graph editor…really giving a much better control over the motion and making keyframing seem much less painful than I’d expected. Hurrah for the graph editor!

(In retrospect, the shadows might be a bit distracting, though. So much for trying to be fancy.)

(Click on the pics)

This little abomination of nature was made with a few extruded spheres and cylinders…the leg is in three parts, and parented from the foot upwards. I did try parenting from the opposite direction (body downwards) but couldn’t quite get the movement I wanted. As it is, the initial jumps work pretty well with the simple keyframe/rotate approach but the curves are still pretty wonky. Looks like he’s floating or something at the top of a couple jumps, especially that big one at the end.

(Click the Pic)

Nevertheless, it has been converted to subdivisions.