We started this rotation with a ‘straight ahead’ animation. Out of all the animating methods, this one was not too difficult, as there was more creative freedom and flow in the movement of my animation, however it was challenging keeping everything at an even scale. When I line tested, I noticed that certain aspects would grow and shrink.
Initially, I felt as though pose to pose animation would be rather tough. When I started working on the inbetweens, it was not as difficult, granted that I constantly line tested. Overall, the method is straightforward, but suffered from having a dull process. Next time, I would go for a simpler character to save time.
In the third task, we looked at ‘arcs and motion’ and ‘timing and spacing’. Drawing out the arc shape helped greatly with making sure that both the ball and the character moved in a ‘realistic’ way. Although the animation looks simple, making sure the ball stays consistent in size all the way was quite the task.
This was not mentioned in the pdf, but the tuft of fabric connected to the character was rather difficult to animate as I was not sure how exactly it would move when the ball rolls across the frame. I ended up deciding for that tuft to just hang limpy off the side of the ‘ball’ part of the character.
For this task, the process was almost like ‘pose to pose’, except it required more inbetweens at the beginning and end of the pose. This creates a more natural movement in the character, as opposed to the slight robotic movement in the second task. In that regard, this was a lot harder than ‘pose to pose’ animation.
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