Assignment 2 - Jumping Animation

This is how I created a climbing up stairs and jumping animation:

Process:

Firstly, I used the walk cycle animation that I had done in part 1 of my assignment. I then deleted some frames in the back and left 4 steps behind.

Secondly, I made the character move up 3 flights of stairs and then ready himself to jump. I used the motion trial to guide me. Anticipation can also be seen from here.

Next, I created several key poses for the jump animation. This involves the lowest and highest points of the jump and the position of the hips, the legs, the hands and the spine. There were a lot of factors needed to make the animation look realistic.

Then, I made the character sustain impact from the jump caused and rebound back up into a recovery position so that the character would really seem like jumping, rather than just landing on the ground as if like a rock.

After recovery, I made the characters move two steps forward to a standing position so that I could prepare for the next part of my animation.

The final part of my animation is where the character looks at his legs for injuries and then waves his hand to the camera, signalling that he's okay and that no injuries were sustained. As you can see, there is ease in and ease out.

This is the storyboard for my jumping animation:

This is the playblast for my jumping animation:

Reflection:

Overall, this animation is probably the hardest I have ever done so far. It involves a lot of factors, such as gravity, weight shift and momentum. At first, I tried to do a long jump animation, which involves the character swinging his hands backward a few times before jumping far. However, the rig had limitations which didn't allow me to bend the legs to the way I want it to be. Therefore, I decided to go for a normal jump animation. The previous walk cycle animation also made this animating this jumping move slightly easier as I had experience with weight shift and hand movement. Overall, I felt that this animation was fun and fulfilling.

References:

I tried to use this as a reference to the long jump animation. However, the long jump animation failed. Nonetheless, this helped me to figure out the key poses for a normal jump animation.

Assignment 2 - Walk Cycle Animation

This is how I created a walk cycle animation of a character.

Process:

Firstly, I created a motion trail for my character's hips. This would allow me to refer to the motion trial for a more smooth and flowy movement of the hips and that the character moves at a standard and good pace.

Next, I animated the upper part of the body first. The upper part of the body is important as it defines the way in which the character moves and is the main focus of the animation. This made the legs stretch to a impossible extent.

I then animated the legs one by one. As you can see from the motion trial, it looks like a sine graph that you would find. It looks wavy and systematic. Therefore, for every key pose, with the help of the grid, I placed the feet at the exact same position, just that the translation of the feet is different for every grid box. This makes sure that the character's hips does not overtake the legs in terms of speed.

After that, I animated the hands. First, the shoulders, then the elbow and lastly the hands. I decided to give it a more natural feel.

Next, I animated the hips to give weight shift. This would make the animation more realistic and less robotic. The hips would then lean towards the leg that is sticking out and the weight would be focused on it.

Finally, as an added bonus, I animated the head. From the movement of the head, you can see that the character is looking for something, or he is lost and is looking for directions.

This is the storyboard of my walk cycle animation:

This is the playblast of my walk cycle animation:

Reflection

This exercise was probably one of the hardest I have ever faced. The final product seemed rushed because I redid the animation twice. Not once, but twice. This is because the first two times, the animations was too slow and the character looked too floaty and unrealistic. I was pretty much quite unhappy when i was told I need to redo because I had done all the hands and weight shift and all that effort has been put to waste. However, with each iteration, I did better work than the previous one. My final one looks better than all my previous iterations too. Also, I had at first made the hip movement very extreme by making the up and down movements of the upper body too much. Thus, by using an editable motion trail, I have made it look less extreme and more realistic. This exercise has taught me the basics of character animation and how to make a character look realistic. Overall, I think this is a good experience.

References

I found this walk cycle reference on the internet and I thought that this pretty much sums up the key poses that were needed in the walk cycle animation. I referred to this image all the time when I was animating my character.

Topic 5 - Animation

Spiderman:

For this exercise, we need to learn how to animate a spiderman rig. This rig was used to do exercise in the previous exercise for posing. However, this exercise was much simpler as it requires us to animate a spiderman rig with weight shift implied on the hips.

These are the 3 key poses of spiderman:

This is the playblast for my spiderman weight shift animation:

Big Dog:

For this exercise, we are required to animate a simple rig called big dog, which consists of a cuboid shape with four legs. It looks like a walking table to be precise. I had to do an animation where big dog is kicked by someone and that it has to regain it's balance by shifting the weight across its legs. I realised that the right front limb would correspond with the left back limb in motion. This is pretty accurate as it allows the big dog to gain balance and not be tilt over to any side. After a while of stumbling, the big dog finally regains it's balance and comes to a stand still. I also learnt how to use the graph editor to create anticipation and ease in ease out for the animation.

These are the 6 key poses for the Big Dog animation:

This is the storyboard for the Big Dog animation:

This is the final playblast for the Big Dog animation:

Reflection

Overall, this exercise was useful in teaching me about weight shift and how it can linked to real life as well as 3D animation. The idea of weight shift makes the characters look more realistic and that animating organic 3D models is not easy. Also, there are many limitations of rigs and that not all rigs can do what a normal human can do.

This exercise also helped me improve my knowledge on the 12 principles of animation, by enforcing it with the graph editor that we have learned in IN3D and teaching us the advanced version of it.

Topic 4 - Rigging

Pose 1:

This pose is a sexy pose, for a model to showcase clothes to people. I believed that this pose is good as it shows off the feminine figure of the rig.

Pose 2:

This is a battle pose. This pose shows the model stopping someone behind her from fighting and that she should take the fight herself instead. I chose this pose because it demonstrates how the rig can showcase thoughts and emotions.

Pose 3:

This is a pose which shows the model flying in the air with her super power. I chose this pose because i can show case the capability of the legs.

Reflection

I find this exercise to be extremely tedious and hard to do, due to the amount of instructions needed to follow and the time taken to rig the model. Also, It was very hard at first for me to orient the joints properly with the model's figure as viewing it from different angles may cause harm to the view of the entire model. A single mistake in orienting the joints would cause the whole rig to go totally off and I would have to redo the entire rig all over again.

I also learnt about the different kind of constraints which prevents the humanoid body of the model from moving in impossible directions or positions that is totally unacceptable for the human body. I also learnt the difference between SCSolver and RPSolver.

Overall, I learnt that rigging is truly a stressful and difficult job for 3D riggers. However, once the rigging is done, the end product would be pretty satisfactory.