This week, Ting talked to us about professional practice and career development. Besides animation skills, she also explained how to collaborate with colleagues, communicate clearly, and stay professional in a real project environment.
In class, Ting mentioned that when we face a problem in a project, we should not immediately pass it to someone else. We should first try to solve it ourselves, such as reopening Maya, rebooting the machine, or looking for documentation and tutorials. If the problem still cannot be solved, we can then ask close classmates, colleagues, or more experienced people. For technical problems, we can ask the lead, TD, or group chat. If the issue is more important or related to decision-making, then we can ask the supervisor.
I found this lesson very useful because communication directly affects teamwork and efficiency. When asking a question, we should clearly explain what problem we have, what we were doing, what we have already tried, and what we think the possible reason might be. This makes the question more professional and easier for others to understand.
This class made me realise that becoming an animator is not only about making good animation. It is also important to work well in a team, stay polite, solve problems actively, and communicate in a clear and professional way.
This week, Ting introduced us to Studio Library. It is a useful plugin for Maya animation, mainly used to save and manage character poses and animation clips. It works like an animation library, allowing us to store useful poses, facial expressions, or movement sections and reuse them later. Compared with adjusting the controllers again every time, Studio Library can make the animation workflow more efficient and help us manage different versions of movement.
In class, we also continued the Piranha Plant attack project from last week. This time, the task was to make the Piranha Plant jump down three steps before connecting it to the attack animation against Mario. This exercise helped me understand the importance of transitions between actions. A character should not only complete separate movements, but also have continuous rhythm, clear weight shifts, and proper anticipation, so the jump and attack can feel natural.
At the same time, I continued improving my girl dancing animation. Based on previous feedback, I kept adjusting the body weight, pelvis rotation, and movement rhythm. I also tried using nCloth to create a skirt for the girl, hoping the fabric could move more naturally with her body. This made me think more about the relationship between character animation and cloth simulation, and how technical testing can influence the final visual result.
This week, Ting introduced us to the animation plugin AnimBot, which is a useful tool for animation work in Maya. It can help animators adjust keyframes more efficiently, copy and mirror poses, change timing, organise curves, and create smoother transitions. Compared with adjusting each controller manually, AnimBot can make the animation workflow faster and more convenient.
In class, Ting demonstrated some basic functions of AnimBot, such as how to quickly adjust poses, control animation timing, and make movements feel smoother. After that, we tried using the plugin to create an animation of a Piranha Plant attack. This exercise required us to show the plant character preparing, building up energy, and then attacking suddenly, so the rhythm and impact of the movement were very important.
Through this workshop, I found that AnimBot is not only a tool for improving efficiency, but also helpful for controlling timing and animation details more clearly. In the future, when working on more complex animation shots, I would like to continue using AnimBot to support pose adjustment, timing, and polishing.
This week, I started working on Assignment: Advanced Animation Shot (Blocking). My plan is to create an animation shot of a girl dancing, so at this stage I mainly focused on using the reference video to define the main actions, key poses, and overall rhythm.
During the blocking stage, I placed the reference video next to my animation and compared the character’s body poses with the dancer’s movements. Dancing is more complex than simple actions because it requires attention to body rhythm, weight shifts, and the coordination between the arms, pelvis, and torso. At this point, I have completed the rough key poses and the general direction of the movement.
Ting’s feedback was that the main problems in my animation were the pelvis rotation and body weight. This made me realise that the pelvis and centre of gravity are very important in dance animation. If the pelvis rotation is not accurate, or if the body weight is not properly placed on the supporting leg, the character can look unstable, stiff, or even like it is floating.
This week’s tasks mainly included two parts: Creature Locomotion polish and Advanced Animation Shot planning.
For the Creature Locomotion task, I continued working on the butterfly flight animation. During the polish stage, I focused on adjusting the rhythm of the wings, the up-and-down movement of the body, and the flight path. I wanted the butterfly to look more natural and gentle, rather than moving in a mechanical way.
At the same time, I also started preparing for the Advanced Animation Shot. This assignment will continue from Week 16 to Week 19, and the final outcome should be a 5–12 second advanced animation shot. I plan to create a shot of a girl dancing. Compared with a simple action, dancing requires more attention to body rhythm, weight shift, and the flow between movements. It is also a good opportunity for me to practise more complex body mechanics.
This week, we completed our group Creature Study Presentation. Our topic was Insects & Bugs: Arthropod Locomotion in Animation. We mainly studied how different insects and arthropods move, and divided our research into three types: flying, such as bees and butterflies; walking, such as ants; and crawling or wriggling, such as centipedes and caterpillars.
There were three people in our group, and each of us focused on a different type of movement. I was responsible for flying insects, especially bees and butterflies. Through the research, I found that bees and butterflies create very different feelings in motion, even though they both fly with wings. Bees have compact bodies and small wings compared with their body size, so they need very fast and high-frequency wing beats to stay in the air. Their flight is usually direct, stable, and purposeful. They can move quickly between flowers and also hover before landing. In contrast, butterflies have light, slim bodies and large, flexible wings. Their flight is slower, softer, and more floating. Their wing movement has a larger amplitude, and their body often moves up and down along a wavy path.
Another group member researched ant walking movement. Ants have six legs, strong jointed limbs, and clear body segmentation. Their main gait is the tripod gait, which means three legs support the body while the other three legs move forward. This alternating rhythm helps the ant stay balanced while walking. The leg motion can be divided into four stages: lift, swing forward, touch down, and push back. During walking, the ant’s body also has a slight sway and small adjustments when changing direction.
The third group member focused on centipedes and caterpillars. Centipedes have many repeated body segments, with each segment connected to a pair of legs. Their movement uses a metachronal wave gait, where the legs move one after another and create a wave-like rhythm. The front part of the body moves more to control direction, while the back follows with a delay. Caterpillars move in a different way. Their motion mainly comes from the body rather than the legs. The soft body compresses and stretches, creating a wave that travels from the rear to the front.
Through this group study, we summarised that arthropod motion can be analysed through the body, limbs, coordination, and secondary motion. In reality, insect movement can be very fast, complex, and chaotic, so in animation we need to simplify the timing, enhance rhythm, and exaggerate body motion when necessary to make the movement clearer and more readable.
During the class presentations, I also learned a lot from other groups, such as the movement of birds, bears, and rabbits. Different animals have different body weights, skeleton structures, and movement rhythms. This made me realise that creature animation should be based on observation and analysis, rather than imagination alone.
This week, Ting’s class focused on Creature Animation. The teacher introduced the basic research process for creature animation, including choosing an animal topic, collecting many video references, and observing how the creature looks, walks, blinks, moves, and behaves. We also learned that we do not need to become anatomy experts, but we should understand the basic structures that are useful for animation, such as leg types, body proportions, spine movement, and gait rhythm.
This week, we will work as a group on a Creature Study. Our group plans to research the movement of insects. There are three people in our group, and our rough division of work is: one person will study crawling insects with legs, one person will study wriggling insects or larvae, and one person will study flying insects. This allows us to compare different types of insect movement, including crawling, wriggling, and flying.
Through this class, I realised that creature animation should not be based only on imagination. It needs careful observation and research. Next, we will continue collecting insect movement references and analyse their gait, body weight, wing movement, and body deformation to prepare for the creature locomotion animation.
This week, Ting’s workshop was Breathing Animation. We needed to use the monster rig provided by the teacher to create a simple breathing animation. Although this exercise seemed basic, it still required attention to many details, such as the rise and fall of the chest, the shift of body weight, and the natural rhythm of breathing. Through this exercise, I realised that even though breathing animation has very small movements, it can make a character feel more alive.
At the same time, Ting also gave me feedback on my Assignment: Dialogue Shot. She thought that my character’s facial expressions were not lively enough, and that the facial changes could be more natural and layered. She also reminded me that the camera framing could be more selective. If the body does not have much animation, it does not need to be fully shown in the shot. The camera can focus more on the character’s face and the key performance area, so the audience can pay more attention to the character’s emotional expression.
This week, Ting’s class focused on Facial Animation III: Dialogue Shot – Lip Sync. The teacher explained the basic workflow of dialogue animation, including Blocking, Blocking Plus, and Polishing. I learned that when creating a dialogue shot, we should first set the key poses and facial expressions, then add body movement, mouth shapes, and timing, and finally refine the details.
In the Lip Sync section, I learned that mouth animation should not simply match every word, but should respond to the sounds. The teacher emphasized finding the accents in the sentence first, then animating the jaw opening, adding the main phonemes, and polishing the final mouth shapes. Different sounds require different mouth corners and lip shapes, so lip sync needs to work closely with the rhythm of the audio.
This week’s workshop was Overlap. We needed to use the provided sea monster file to animate it swimming, showing good follow through and overlap on its body and fins. This exercise helped me understand that different body parts should not move at exactly the same time. Instead, they need delay and drag, which makes the animation feel more natural.
In Week 10, Ting introduced two important assignments: the Dialogue Shot assignment and The Professional Artist Interview assignment.
For the Dialogue Shot assignment, we need to combine what we have learned so far, including story, reference, camera, acting, and facial animation, to create a half-body dialogue animation. This assignment requires us to use one of the provided audios and the Yu Long rig. The shot should be no longer than 11 seconds, and only one character’s face should be shown. Ting also emphasized that the focus of this assignment is not complex body mechanics, but facial animation and lip sync. Therefore, the shot can be a close-up or medium shot, allowing the audience to clearly see the character’s facial expressions, eye movement, and mouth shapes.
Ting also introduced The Professional Artist Interview assignment. For this task, we need to interview a professional artist currently working in the industry and learn about their career path, daily work, technical expectations, and portfolio advice. Ting reminded us to stay polite and professional when contacting and interviewing industry professionals. For example, we should reach out through LinkedIn or professional email, clearly introduce who we are and explain the purpose of the interview, while also respecting their time. After the interview, we should also send a thank-you email.
