Animation progress status and observed issues

For the past weeks I have been working on the blocking stage of the animation process. In the last blog post I had about 128 unfilled frames (most important positions, no transitional frames) and now the blocking stage is almost done at 407 frames. Although far from being complete or polished enough, the animation is now starting to shape.

In the last post I was also talking about how I have changed my approach on the deliverables of this project in terms of animation composition. As I have started the demo with a walking animation and then had the character transition into a form of suspicious, sneaky walk, I have decided to have the model perform a few walk types that all display a different persona. The first is a natural walk, where the character peacefully walks along. The second one is when the character walks as if sneaking into a building or behind someone’s back, treading carefully and being extremely cautious of the surroundings to not alert anybody. In the third one, the character walks as if he ‘owns the place’: he is therefore strong, displaying a bold, shoulders-back, chest-up walk. Feet twisted, knees swivelling with each step. The character would then transition into a running stance after which the animation ends.

As such, having the character go through a series of different walking acts that all display a different sort of personality with different intentions would demonstrate my ability to ‘give characters unique personalities and emotions through animation’ while also ‘bringing characters to life with realistic human motion’, as seen in the requirements of multiple job adverts. In addition, the demo will of course demonstrate my ability to create keyframed animation while taking into consideration the animation principles such as timing, character acting and more.

Progress

As I was saying, I am now on 407 frames in terms of progress on the animation. Although not all of the frames have been animated (hence why it’s called a blocking stage), I laid down the most important poses such as the contact, down, pass and up positions for the walks. At the moment all the action is structured on 12’s, or two steps per second as I mentioned in the last blog post. This means that there are 3 empty frames in between each pose, so between say the contact and down pose there are 3 other empty frames, which leaves me with enough ‘space’ for details. The 407 frames animation looks like this at the moment:

To realise the first walk I have used a plane to which I have added a pose to pose illustration of a walk cycle out of R. Williams ‘The Animator’s Survival Kit’ book as a diffuse colour map. The image served me well as a reference for the first few poses of the character, granted I have never worked with 3D animation before. The same is valid for the running part, where I have used yet another illustration on a plane as reference, since there are quite a few differences between the poses of a walk to those of a run. For the sneaky walk and the bold walk I haven’t used any reference but rather worked out of my imagination and photographic memory as I used to watch quite a few cartoons years back.

Issues

Seeing the above animation render, there are quite a few issues I have identified within that will need to be addressed.

Firstly, the first few frames of the normal walk are wobbly and the steps taken are rather unequal. This I have expected as those are really the very first frames I have ever animated in 3D. I might say the number of controllers had me a bit overwhelmed at first, but further down the path the walk starts looking better meaning I got used with the controls.

Secondly, there is way too much movement of the pelvis during the sneaky walk part, which makes it look unnatural. The same is valid for the hands which are moving too much for a character whose intentions are to sneak. The hands sudden movements would instantly draw all the attention towards the character, which is not what I intended. In turn, I will reduce the movement so that the hands only help in maintaining balance rather than drawing attention.

Thirdly, the bold walk seems too generic to me. Although I think it’s the best executed scene out of the four, I also think it lacks detail here and there. Maybe have the character nod his head left and right as if he was saluting an imaginary crowd. Some more up and down motion would also be good, especially during the down poses.

Lastly, the running animation part is again very wobbly, similar to the first few steps of the normal walk. I will have to readjust the poses and maybe slow down the overall speed as it seems too fast at the moment. I also have to be wary of the ‘Slow in and slow out’ animation principle that naturally says that a running person doesn’t simply reach final speed as soon as it starts running and nor does it stop in an instant.

References:

Indeed.co.uk. (2019). Animation Jobs - April 2019 | Indeed.co.uk. [online] Available at: https://www.indeed.co.uk/jobs?q=Animation&start=10&vjk=c9476d0f54bbedeb [Accessed 11 Apr. 2019].