The goal of this assignment is to give you practice controlling expressive aspects of motion. Recall that the LMA Action Drive offers 8 different combinations of Effort qualities:
|
Evocative Name |
Weight |
Time |
Space |
|
Punch |
Strong |
Sudden |
Direct |
|
Slash |
Strong |
Sudden |
Indirect |
|
Press |
Strong |
Sustained |
Direct |
|
Wring |
Strong |
Sustained |
Indirect |
|
Dab |
Light |
Sudden |
Direct |
|
Flick |
Light |
Sudden |
Indirect |
|
Glide |
Light |
Sustained |
Direct |
|
Float |
Light |
Sustained |
Indirect |
For this assignment, you should create an animation of four of these using only the movements of a sphere. You can pick any four that you like. Each animation should be at least 5 seconds long and show just the movement of a single sphere. If 5 seconds is too long to show a single move of the given drive combination (it will likely be for many of these), show multiple movements of the same drive constellation (e.g. Punch).
Label these four animations “A.mov”, “B.mov”, “C.mov” and “D.mov”. Do NOT identify the particular drive constellation in the title of the movie. In a separate readme file, list which drive constellation you were trying to achieve in each movie (e.g. “A was meant to be a Punch, B was meant to be a flick, etc.). We will watch each movie without reading the file and try to identify the Efforts. If we can correctly label all four based just on the animations, you will get an A on the assignment.
It may be helpful to add a checkerboard or other basic texture if rotation is important in your animation. Otherwise, don’t customize your sphere to try to look like a particular Action Drive. Rely on the motion to communicate which combination you are animating.
Also include a composite clip “composite.mov” that shows all four animations playing simultaneously. The easiest way to do this is to create all of the animations in one Maya file. You can then render it to create the composite. For the other four, turn the visibility attribute off of the three spheres you don’t want to display and set your camera to film the remaining one. (It may be helpful to also create the animation with only a single sphere showing at a time.) Don’t put much effort into making an overall composition with the four animations. The composite movie is just to show the contrast between the four movements. Make sure each sphere is visible. Put your time into making sure that each individual animation reads well.
Specific grading criteria:
- Effectiveness of the motion at capturing the particular Action Drive combinations.
- Use of timing, path variation, etc.
- Each clip is at least 5 seconds.
- The clips are well composed and rendered so that they are clearly visible.
- Labeling and readme instructions are correctly followed.
What to submit:
- Five rendred movies, labeled as specified.
- your complete Maya project folder
- readme file
The basic submission procedure is the same as for all assignments.
- You will be submitting your entire Maya project folder. All additional files (e.g. the readme.txt and movie files) should be in the root of that folder.
- N.B. Name your project folder as “A3YourName”, where “YourName” is your first and last name. This is how we will identify your submission.
- Submit by following the instructions below. If you need to update the submission, just copy another folder and update your name with v2, v3, etc. We will only mark the last submission.
1. The "classes" folder should be automatically mounted. If it isn't, there should be a link on your desktop that you can double click on to mount the folders. The link is called “tcsserver.ucdavis.edu/Classes”.
2. In the classes folder, open"TCS 131".
3. Drag and drop your assignment into the "Submissions" folder. Make sure
it is named correctly, as described above.