Watch My Vedios

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pupDGXqz71o

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PXc7JMGHwo

THE 12 BASIC PRINCIPLES OF ANIMATION

Paraphrased by Nataha Light foot from the "Illusion Of Life" by Frank Thomas & Ollie Johnston.(pp.47-69) Look these up and read the original version for a complete understanding.

1. Squash and stretch
2. Anticipation
3. Staging
4. Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose
5. Follow Through and Overlapping Action
6. Slow In and Slow Out
7. Arcs
8. Secondary Action
9. Timing
10. Exaggeration
11. Solid Drawing (same or different as Weight)
12. Appeal

#1 SQUASH AND STRETCHThis action gives the illusion of weight and volume to a character as it moves. Also squash and stretch is useful in animating dialogue and doing facial expressions. How extreme the use of squash and stretch is, depends on what is required in animating the scene. Usually it's broader in a short style of picture and subtler in a feature. It is used in all forms of character animation from a bouncing ball to the body weight of a person walking. This is the most important element you will be required to master and will be used often.

#2 ANTICIPATIONThis movement prepares the audience for a major action the character is about to perform, such as, starting to run, jump or change expression. A dancer does not just leap off the floor. A backwards motion occurs before the forward action is executed. The backward motion is the anticipation. A comic effect can be done by not using anticipation after a series of gags that used anticipation. Almost all real action has major or minor anticipation such as a pitcher's wind-up or a golfers' back swing. Feature animation is often less broad than short animation unless a scene requires it to develop a characters personality.

#3 STAGINGA pose or action should clearly communicate to the audience the attitude, mood, reaction or idea of the character as it relates to the story and continuity of the story line. The effective use of long, medium, or close up shots, as well as camera angles also helps in telling the story. There is a limited amount of time in a film, so each sequence, scene and frame of film must relate to the overall story. Do not confuse the audience with too many actions at once. Use one action clearly stated to get the idea across, unless you are animating a scene that is to depict clutter and confusion. Staging directs the audience's attention to the story or idea being told. Care must be taken in background design so it isn't obscuring the animation or competing with it due to excess detail behind the animation. Background and animation should work together as a pictorial unit in a scene.

#4 STRAIGHT AHEAD AND POSE TO POSE ANIMATIONStraight ahead animation starts at the first drawing and works drawing to drawing to the end of a scene. You can lose size, volume, and proportions with this method, but it does have spontaneity and freshness. Fast, wild action scenes are done this way. Pose to Pose is more planned out and charted with key drawings done at intervals throughout the scene. Size, volumes, and proportions are controlled better this way, as is the action. The lead animator will turn charting and keys over to his assistant. An assistant can be better used with this method so that the animator doesn't have to draw every drawing in a scene. An animator can do more scenes this way and concentrate on the planning of the animation. Many scenes use a bit of both methods of animation.

#5 FOLLOW THROUGH AND OVERLAPPING ACTIONWhen the main body of the character stops all other parts continue to catch up to the main mass of the character, such as arms, long hair, clothing, coat tails or a dress, floppy ears or a long tail (these follow the path of action). Nothing stops all at once. This is follow through. Overlapping action is when the character changes direction while his clothes or hair continues forward. The character is going in a new direction, to be followed, a number of frames later, by his clothes in the new direction. "DRAG," in animation, for example, would be when Goofy starts to run, but his head, ears, upper body, and clothes do not keep up with his legs. In features, this type of action is done more subtly. Example: When Snow White starts to dance, her dress does not begin to move with her immediately but catches up a few frames later. Long hair and animal tail will also be handled in the same manner. Timing becomes critical to the effectiveness of drag and the overlapping action.

#6 SLOW-OUT AND SLOW-IN
As action starts, we have more drawings near the starting pose, one or two in the middle, and more drawings near the next pose. Fewer drawings make the action faster and more drawings make the action slower. Slow-ins and slow-outs soften the action, making it more life-like. For a gag action, we may omit some slow-out or slow-ins for shock appeal or the surprise element. This will give more snap to the scene.

#7 ARCSAll actions, with few exceptions (such as the animation of a mechanical device), follow an arc or slightly circular path. This is especially true of the human figure and the action of animals. Arcs give animation a more natural action and better flow. Think of natural movements in the terms of a pendulum swinging. All arm movement, head turns and even eye movements are executed on an arcs.

#8 SECONDARY ACTIONThis action adds to and enriches the main action and adds more dimension to the character animation, supplementing and/or re-enforcing the main action. Example: A character is angrily walking toward another character. The walk is forceful, aggressive, and forward leaning. The leg action is just short of a stomping walk. The secondary action is a few strong gestures of the arms working with the walk. Also, the possibility of dialogue being delivered at the same time with tilts and turns of the head to accentuate the walk and dialogue, but not so much as to distract from the walk action. All of these actions should work together in support of one another. Think of the walk as the primary action and arm swings, head bounce and all other actions of the body as secondary or supporting action.

#9 TIMINGExpertise in timing comes best with experience and personal experimentation, using the trial and error method in refining technique. The basics are: more drawings between poses slow and smooth the action. Fewer drawings make the action faster and crisper. A variety of slow and fast timing within a scene adds texture and interest to the movement. Most animation is done on twos (one drawing photographed on two frames of film) or on ones (one drawing photographed on each frame of film). Twos are used most of the time, and ones are used during camera moves such as trucks, pans and occasionally for subtle and quick dialogue animation. Also, there is timing in the acting of a character to establish mood, emotion, and reaction to another character or to a situation. Studying movement of actors and performers on stage and in films is useful when animating human or animal characters. This frame by frame examination of film footage will aid you in understanding timing for animation. This is a great way to learn from the others.

#10 EXAGGERATIONExaggeration is not extreme distortion of a drawing or extremely broad, violent action all the time. It¹s like a caricature of facial features, expressions, poses, attitudes and actions. Action traced from live action film can be accurate, but stiff and mechanical. In feature animation, a character must move more broadly to look natural. The same is true of facial expressions, but the action should not be as broad as in a short cartoon style. Exaggeration in a walk or an eye movement or even a head turn will give your film more appeal. Use good taste and common sense to keep from becoming too theatrical and excessively animated

#11 SOLID DRAWINGThe basic principles of drawing form, weight, volume solidity and the illusion of three dimension apply to animation as it does to academic drawing. The way you draw cartoons, you draw in the classical sense, using pencil sketches and drawings for reproduction of life. You transform these into color and movement giving the characters the illusion of three-and four-dimensional life. Three dimensional is movement in space. The fourth dimension is movement in time.

#12 APPEALA live performer has charisma. An animated character has appeal. Appealing animation does not mean just being cute and cuddly. All characters have to have appeal whether they are heroic, villainous, comic or cute. Appeal, as you will use it, includes an easy to read design, clear drawing, and personality development that will capture and involve the audience¹s interest. Early cartoons were basically a series of gags strung together on a main theme. Over the years, the artists have learned that to produce a feature there was a need for story continuity, character development and a higher quality of artwork throughout the entire production. Like all forms of story telling, the feature has to appeal to the mind as well as to the eye.

Creating optimized caustics in Maya Mental ray

Creating Caustics effects is very  interesting lets Learn how to do it

Caustics is effect that is calculated by emmiting photons from light emitter which are refracted or reflected through one surface to another surface giving us a caustics effect. Here are some examples of caustics effect:

In this tutorial we’ll stick with refracted caustics for now.
Like in real world to make caustics in our scene we need photons emited from light source. This can be really time consuming so it’s best to keep things optimized in start. We gonna use one trick to make render really fast and still have nice and precise caustics.
Lets make some test scene rig for our render.
This is simple rig that I made. One metal handle with 3 legs and revolved glass object.

Now lets make HDRI lightning for scene.
In render globals assign Mental Ray as renderer.

n the most bottom of settings you have Enivoronment section. Expand and click on CREATE button for Image based lighning

Now click on folder button and browse for some HDRI image. If you dontk now what HDRI images are go to Paul Debevec’s web site which is great resorce for HDRI images understanding.
Link : http://www.debevec.org/
There you can find out more how HDRI images work and find some free samples of HDRI images.
Now go back to render settings and change render preset to Production.

That will make enough refractions and reflections for your render of final scene.
Now open Final Gathering section and turn on that option and make 250 samples.

You should get something like this. Still no lights and shadows or glass shaders.

Now lets make some simple glass shader using Maya’s standard Blinn shader and MentalRay’s dielectric shader.
Make one blinn shader and one dielectric material which you can find in MentalRay materials.

Now open attributes for blinn material and go to output connections by clicking button that is marked on picture below. That will allow you to override maya’s blinn material with dielectric.

You’ll get blinn’s output settings.
Now with Middle Mouse Button drag ‘n drop dielectric material that you made moment ago to Material shader in custom shader pallete. Like in pic bellow.
Now make Dielectric material photon and drag ‘n drop like before in blinn Photon shader

With this you are overrided blins shaders, and put materials from mental ray.
Now go to attributes of dielectric material and change color to red and index of refraction to 1.33
Now render should look like this.

I’m sure you asking now where is caustics??? Well we didn’t put a light source yet. So let’s do that now.
Make Area light and change his shape to Disc and turn on ray trace shadows coz we want to have nice soft shadows under object. Like on picture below. But don’t turn on emit Photons option. Coz we’ll make another light for that now.

Now make one spot light and place it to match light direction from area light. Coz we gonna use that light just for emiting photons and we’ll turn off emit light and shadows for that light.

Got to properties for that light. Turn off emit diffuse and emit speculer options and in metal ray section turn on emit photons. If emit caustic photons enabled but you can edit caustic options. Got to mental ray settings in render options and turn on caustics. Now again got to properties of light and you can change caustics options.
Now change settins for that light like on picture:

Now select you spot light. Go to Panels/Look through selected and tweak your light source so it just covers part of scene where is a object that haves refractions and you want to emit photons. You can do that with cone angle option and move tool for that light. I made in my scene cone angle 15 so it just surrounds object like in picture.

If all is ok and you fallowed all steps you should get something like in next render.

But caustics are still need some tweak! Our glass is red.. so that means that caustics need to be red too!
So go to properties of caustic shader and change color to red!ow should be ok!

And it’s finished. Now your render should look like this!

I put this with images in my system those are not my own prepared Put my won as soon as possible