Week 3’s class was all about weight as well as squash and stretch. Animating a character without weight and a centre of gravity makes the character appear lifeless as well as unrealistic. Everything has a centre of gravity, even if it is a lifeless or still object.
Also not having enough or having too many frames can make an animation wrong or disjointed. If there are not enough frames, the character appears to “strobe” and look disjointed. If there are too many frames, the character appears to linger for too long and appears wrong.
Also during this lesson, I was introduced to the dope sheet in Maya for the first time. The dope sheet, like the graph editor, is another tool in which animators use to tweak their animations. Like the graph editor, keyed frames can be moved around to adjust the animation slightly to improve it and add things, e.g. weight, squash and stretch.
marktomczyk 