Hello there, been a long time again. I would say a combination of procrastination (plenty of it!), gaming (mainly World War Z and Tetr.io), youtube browsing/time wasting, the odd bit of job searching, has culminated in my 3 month absence from my personal animation exercises. But I’m back with the final of the flour sack exercises! Exercise 11 is entitled: Flour Sack Kicking A Ball, although more than one kick, here’s my rendition of it:
Firstly I roughed out the main poses for the flour sack, then spaced these poses out to what seemed about right in terms of timing. Next, I animated the ball to be in time with those poses, it was just the up and down motion of the ball, the same approach used in the bouncing ball exercise where you focus on one aspect of the ball motion first. Once I was happy with the ball timing, I tweaked the spacing of the flour sack poses to match the ball.
Whilst iterating through and refining the flour sack motion, I’d say the trickiest aspect was trying to maintain the flour sacks’ mass all the way through, especially with extreme poses, it was very easy to make the sack look like it’d lost mass or gained mass from one moment to the next, so maintaining that ‘mass consistency’ was in some ways a balancing act, I think I did okayish in that regard.
Once flour sack was refined, it was time to add in the rest of the ball animation, namely the side motion and rotation, and a little squash and stretch where appropriate, again taking cues from the bouncing ball exercise. I used ball rig 7 again from Yolanda Afán Asencio, really versatile rig and highly recommended.
Flour Rig created by Joe Daniels.
Ball Rig 7 created by Yolanda Afán Asencio
Exercise taken from Animator Island.
Kun 