Feed Back from Formative:

Following the formative assement were I recived feed bak on my work I decided to make some amendments to my work where it was suggested.

Ball 1: Bouncy ball with a liquid interior

On the first bounce Dan felt that the ball stuck in the air too much. This due to the deformer stretching the ball too much making it look like it was hanging in the air for too long. I changed this by deleting on of the deformer key frames and the ball was deformed less therefore making the bounce look right.

Ball 3: A hard bouncy ball moving across a plane

With the ball moving across the plane Dan felt that there were many issues. The arches were too long, the ball hang in the air giving the ball the appearnce that the ball was activly bouncing forward as if it had a mind of it's own. Also the timing of the bounces were incorrect resulting in the ball speeding up at the end and stopping with a bit of a kick.

To solve the problem of the spacing and the timing I went back to my refernce video and took note of when the ball hit the ground using the audio. Once I had keyed in the down positions in Maya I placed the up positions directly in between. This resulted in a much longer bounce and more smaller bounces at the end occuring at the right speed.

To prevent a kick at the end I decided to add a roatation to the ball (and Ramp Lamber to help see the rotation). By adding roataion to the ball as it bounced and came to a stop really made the movement of the ball look much more realistic.

3 Bouncy balls moving across plane amended.

Below is the vidoe of the three balls boucing with the above two balls amended. The benefit of seeing the balls together allows one to see the differenec in the bounce's timing, spacing and weight/ material.

Ball and Tail

Overall the feed back for this character animation was very good and Dan seemed to enjoy watching the character. The only point which improvment could be pace was the flop of the tail at the end. I had animated the tail as if it was made of light material, imagining the large part of the tail to be made of  a lot of hair. Dan however felt that as that was the biggerst part of the tail that it would inded be heavier. As this was the first feed back I'd had form an audience I decided to follow the audiences assumption of tail weight and made the tail heavier. This was simple to amend using the time line, dragging the correct key closer together and then using the snap tool.

Ball and Legs Walk Cycles:

Skipping

The problem with this cycle is that the ball didn't jump high on the passing position. After having done this if felt that the skip had much more energy and pep. I also brought in the feet making them fall close together as I felt that when the were far apart that the weight of the jump was diminished. Furthermore when one jumps and place all their weight on one foot they tend to place their foot under the body to gain maximum stability. By doing this with my skip it felt a more natural way to place the weight.

Tiptoe

With the tiptoe style I tried to create, Dan said that the strides of my character where not long enough had to extend further to give a feeling of exaggerated movement. Also to add to this a sense of cushioning in and out as it bobbed back and forth. So by extending the stride of the leg and experimenting with back and forth motion, and a little rotation I feel the rig moves in a more dynamic way and from a profile point of view defiantly feels more like a tiptoe walk.

Limp

To create this walk I made one stride take longer than another. This created a slight amount of kicking in the characters left leg. Here there was only the question of changing the timing of the keys, by making them more spaced out, making the stride take longer the kick was removed.