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.