Forth week on my MA Character Animation course. This week was how to animated a lift, and personally a difficult exercise to do. Started off looking at people lifting heavy bowling balls and how to lift a heavy object and then sketch down the key-frames.

Then, I jumped onto a light box drawn down the keyframes down and then use the Flipbook program on the mac, to drawn down the frames to test if the keyframes worked. Which it didn’t felt that the keyframes didn’t work due to the lengths of the legs.

Then, I went into a 3D program called Maya3D. Possibly the only time I will be using this 3D program within the next two years. I downloaded a character who already model and rigged called Blake to do this animation. Instead of myself to created a model and rigging it, which will take some time to create.

Then in Maya, I created two different lifts were Blake lifts up the bowling ball. I felt the second animation below (lift3D v2) worked better, because the lifting of the bowling ball looked more natural to pick up in my opinion.

Then I gone into Adobe Flash and try to do this exercise once again with lifting, felt that the first flash animation didn’t work due to the body had different body sizes throughout the animation in my opinion.

The second go in flash, I had a looked at Richard Williams technique from his book (The Animators Survival Kit) and I traced/Rotoscop his model lifted the rock in flash and added some more frames in-between to give the animation a little more smoothness to the animation.

Overall, I felt this exercise was a difficult challenge to animate a lift in my opinion. Personally my animation out of the four was possibly be the second 3D animation because it look more natural to lift. End of that exercise.

Bye.