DAA243 - 3D Animation 1: Principles
I learned the Maya workspace for animation in this course taught by Professor Genevieve Freckelton. Through the class, I learned the essential toolkit available in the Graph Editor, Animation workspace, and navigating through Maya. The 12 Animation Principles, and the three types of animation styles were all practiced during this course.
DAA 2nd Year Sophomore
University of Silicon Valley
An aspiring 3D animator pursuing a Bachelor's in Digital Art and Animation in the University of Silicon Valley. I am inspired by both indie and studio animation companies, which include Studios Dreamworks, Blur, Riot, Grackle, Naughty Dog.
Introspection About The Course
With over ten years of animation experience (2014-ongoing), I came into the course with a heavy confidence that I will excel in the course assignments to animate per week. In order to earn an A+ at the end of the course and reduce the time it takes to animate, I had to change my looney habits about animating exclusively on ones in straight ahead action.
From May 12, 2025 - August 24, 2025.
I learned Maya's animation workspace and graph editor tools through repetition and reference in the course material. Watching through the course videos taught me ideal workflows to animate efficiently and cleanly. There is a lot of changes to my habits to fit the industry-standard introduction to 3D animation: alternative animation methods, realism, and various rigs, all promoted the ideal change I pursued to earn the A+ I needed.
The alternative animation methods I learn are animating on fours and fives, pose-to-pose, and layered animation. I also practiced storyboard thumbnails too.
The style the course designated its students to follow is realism, since the 12 principles of animation is easiest to replicate on everyday movement. I really enjoyed animating in a realistic sense, which brought my attention to balance and weight shifts during walks, runs, jumps, and more on bipedal creatures. I pushed my sense of realism up the ante post-arm slap animation because my professor critiqued and self-taught straight ahead action on ones approach.
I am very familiar with rigs as I have made some on my own with inverse and forward kinematics alongside vertex controllers. However, I learned that professional rigs have control bones with unique, customizable attributes like foot rolls, rocks, and local positions/rotations to fix fingers and feet without having to manually animate the bones. This is incredibly useful for optimizing the speed to animate background level character animation.
I relearned many things here, erased the bad habits, and corrected my approach to animating so I could achieve a healthy workflow I could preach when I reach great heights with animation. Being able to know the animation software's toolkits and potential to cut time and save memory is instrumental to managing a team of animators when I reach my dream of being an Animation Director. Not only will I have the skills, but I will also have the focus and drive to lead others to create a consistent project style given that I continue honing the 12 Principles of Animation in 3D.
Below are my organized assignments:
Week 1: Tennis Ball Animation
A focus on timing, arcs, staging, squash and stretch, straight ahead action, and appeal.
Week 3-4: Ball With Tail Exercise
With the ball mechanics in mind, I tactfully animated this project with ease and simple direction.
Week 2: 3 Ball Animation
A beach ball, bowling ball, and tennis ball each have different fundamental physics to animate.
Week 5-6: Arm Slap Animation
It was after this my professor specifically asked me to focus on pose-to-pose, and taught me Maya's Euler Filter.
Week 7-8: Walk Cycle (Stationary and Progressive)
Utilizing Maya's Motion Trail system, the shelf system, and utilizing the attributes of an Academic rig, I animated a walk cycle with Pose-to-Pose with efforts towards polishing a realistic walk for background character animation.
Week 9: Run Cycle
The run cycle I created was done in less than two hours, showing that my ability to animate is now clean and efficient.
Week 10-11: Jump
The blocking and polish for the jump animation presents an adequate understanding of body mechanics. Focuses: Thumbnails, grease pencil, and secondary actions.
Week 12-14: Apple
This animation utilizes all principles of animation, and shows my proficient use of layered animation which uses a combination of pose-to-pose, straight ahead action, and all controllers in the Goldie rig provided by USV.
Arm-Slap (Thumbnail)
The thumbnail above is a preface to how I approach animations if I had to come up with my own storyboards.
I followed my thumbnails very closely.
Jump (Thumbnail)
My thumbnails were simplified to maximize the time for animation. The jump animation is one of my strongest animations this semester.
Apple (Thumbnail)
Organizing my thumbnails more with keys and dividers captures the actions I wanted to animate. This thumbnail and animation wrapped up my semester with an A+.