The Animation Process - Blocking stage



Since the last blog post I have started the animation process after briefly checking the skin deformations one more time and conducting basic scene management preparations (organising layers, hiding unnecessary bones and goals, etc.) before finally getting started on the animation.

As I have mentioned before, the aim of the project was to create a walking animation, a pose animation and a jump animation for the chosen (human, biped) model. The animations would’ve been presented separately by having the character walk first, then strike a pose and ultimately perform a jump of sorts. The issue was that no matter how hard I looked through other artists’ animation reels, I couldn’t find such simple and rather ‘secluded’ animation cycles. Most of the reels told a story, or multiple ones. The idea is the character was never ‘just’ walking or jumping, or striking a 3 seconds pose and then that was it. Most of the reels had the character/s perform multiple actions, they had the characters acting, not aimlessly walking from point A to point B.

As a result, I have adopted a slightly different approach when it comes to the composition of the demo reel deliverables: I have since gone through a series of ideas on how I could combine these three different animations to create a one-off, complete animation where the animated model displays at least a trace of character, where the model acts as if it was alive.  This is also based on the specific requirements of the jobs I have identified in my ‘Further Research and Observations’ blog post where ‘bringing characters to life with realistic human and animal motion’ is an actual common requirement. The ideas went from having the model strike some sudden dance moves while walking (on a catchy tune) to performing some flips as an athlete, although I did not settle on an idea yet.

I have then started animating the model using a combination of the straight ahead and pose to pose animation techniques I have identified and written about in the ‘Research – The Animator’s Survival Kit’ blog post. I had the character start walking at a rather normal pace or ‘walking on 12’s’ because ‘generally, people walk on 12’s’ as I have also noted in my ‘More research – The Animator’s Survival Kit – Part 2’ post.                                                                                           



I was pleased to discover the rig I have built is working accordingly and the mesh deformations are at least average from what I have seen until now. There weren’t any wrong bones interactions or strange mesh deformations either.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Final research on 'The Animator's Survival Kit' by R. Williams - Part 3

Image
The heel (page 136) ‘The heel is the lead part. The foot is secondary and follows along. The heel leads and the actual foot drags behind and flops forward – but the heel controls it.’ For walks and runs one should keep the heel flat on the ground until the last possible moment before lifting it. That will give the feeling of weight to the animation. There is an illustration that demonstrates this also: The following drawing serves as a guide for a correct heels motion during a ‘normal’ walk: Also setting a tempo:             Weight shift (page 146) ‘The weight shifts from one foot to another in a normal stride. Each time we raise a foot it thrusts the weight of our body forward and to the side over the other foot. And the shoulders mostly oppose the hips and the buttocks.’ As discussed in a previous post, walking represents a series of controlled falls. As a result, the...
Read more

Adding custom attributes and controllers - Part 2 Spine

Image
In a similar fashion to the work I’ve covered last week, this week I have taken care of adding custom attributes and controllers to the upper body. At the end of this work session I had the spine, neck and head of the model rigged. The control shapes were the first to be added. I needed five different controllers affecting five different bones, some independently, some affecting two or more bones at a time. As seen above, these controllers were in order: COM controller (or the Master controller) – This controller serves as the main one: all the other (body) controllers have been linked to it. When moved, the whole body follows. The same is valid for rotation. Hips controller – This controller takes care of the hips movement (or the spine base). When rotated, the pelvis follows the rotation along with the hips. However, the first spine bone should rotate to a degree as well as a result. To get that effect, ‘Parameter Wiring’ has been used: a new Euler XYZ rota...
Read more

Refining the animation - Leisure walk

Image
In the next few blog posts I will be discussing about the problems I have identified in one of my older blog posts (Animation progress status and observed issues) and how I have solved them over the past few weeks. The posts will each be focused on one of the animations separately, starting with the leisure walk animation in this post followed by the sneak, the bold walk and ending with the running animation. I believe that by organising the blog posts in this way will make it easier for me and anybody else to refer back to if necessary, as well as keeping the blog posting constant, tidy and succinct. The leisure walk The issues I have identified last time in this first part of the animation chain were that the walk is rather wobbly and some of the steps are unequal. The seemly unstableness of the model when walking was caused by the excessive movement of specific parts of the body. For example, upon taking a closer look at the first 20 or 30 frames I have noticed that ...
Read more