Walk Cycle
I knew a fair amount about creating a walk cycle before starting this assessment from a Berkeley online course I was attending from the start of this semester, so I was able to use that knowledge when posing my walk cycle for this assessment. Halfway through the semester, we had lectures from 2D character animator Niall Doherty about 2D walk cycles. I knew I wanted to do a 3D walk cycle using the Jack rig, however, I was happy to have these lectures as they reiterated the principals of animation and taught me how to do the 5 key poses in a walk cycle. At this point I hadn’t animated arms in a walk cycle, so I found this useful.
Body mechanics was the first part of this assessment where I knew what direction I want to go. I wanted to attempt to do a spiderman swing, but I didn’t know what personality my walk or run cycle would have yet, so I decided to make all three of my animations inspired by spiderman. After deciding this, I knew there was one walk that stood out in the spiderman universe, so I used “Cool Peter Parker” as my reference.
I began by using animator’s survival kit as my reference for blocking out the key poses, which consist of both contact poses, the down pose, passing pose, and up pose. Using the dope sheet, I then spaced out the key frames and turned on post infinity cycle in the graph editor to see what changes I needed to make. The post infinity cycle didn’t work until I copied and pasted the first contact pose to the end of the cycle. As well as using Tobey Maguire’s walk from Spiderman 3, I researched confident walk cycles as that was the theme of his walk. Researching these helped break down the poses as there wasn’t a full view of Peter in the movie.
Throughout all the videos, all walks seemed to present similar themes. The speed of their walks were a little slow with distance between the feet, there was no urgency to get anywhere. Their arms and shoulders were also very relaxed, their heads were turned a little upwards and chests were pushed out.
After making these changes, I noticed there was knee popping in both knees which distracted from the rest of the walk cycle. I found it difficult to fix at first, but I rotated the toe pivot instead of rotating the leg control when leaving the contact pose so the foot wouldn’t go through the ground. I also rotated the control above the thigh and swivelled the heal to stop the popping.
I turned the elbows outwards and made the upward and downward swings quicker to closer match Peter’s walk, rather than look like a more generic confident walk. To make him look more relaxed, I lowered the shoulders during each contact and down pose.
Run Cycle
For my run cycle, I used animators’ survival kit again to block out my key poses, then used run cycles from Into the Spiderverse and the Spiderman game to add more personality to my run. I quickly decided I wanted my run cycle to be inspired more by Miles Morales than Peter Parker as Peters was more of a generic run. I didn’t make my run as fast as Miles’s run as his was extremely quick and didn’t leave much room for working with spacing and in-betweens. I still made mine a fast run, but I took more inspiration from his poses rather than timing and spacing.
I went through the frames on the “Anyone can wear the mask” YouTube video to analyse his key poses as they were different from the generic run in the animator’s survival kit. His arms went higher and legs were spread out more and spent less time on the ground.
After figuring out his key poses, his arms and legs seemed jittery and stiff, so I used the graph editor to delete unnecessary keyframes and make the arcs smoother. I also made his strides even longer, so the run had more urgency, like Miles’s.
As the Jack rig had different proportions than Miles, I found it a little difficult to match the key poses. Miles is thinner and has longer legs, so my strides didn’t seem as long as his. After exaggerating his rotations on his chest and hips, I was happier with how he looked as he resembled Miles a little more.
Body Mechanics
It was harder than I thought to get reference videos for the body mechanics part of this assessment. Many of the videos from the movies only showed Peter or Miles swinging for a short period of time and the camera angles didn’t usually show a clear pose, so it was difficult to find a swing to work from. I used Andrew Garfield’s Spiderman for the fall and landing of the swing, and Peter Parker from the game for everything in between. I first animated on 3s like the walk and run cycle so I could see where needed spaced out more. The first few poses needed spaced out much more than the other keyframes as the fall was far too fast compared to the rest of the swing.
For the fall into the swing, I changed the hands to make it look like they were shooting and grabbing onto a web. I added a long cylinder to the file and animated it rotating so I knew the direction Jack would be swinging and how far he would lift and fall from the ground going in and out of the swing. When grabbing the web, I tried to make it look as though there was a little stretch in the web whilst still having a bit of an abrupt finish to the fall, as in the movies, Peter was always able to stretch the web when fighting or swinging. I used the first YouTube video linked below to help me understand weight when it came to this part of the animation. I also had to add in-betweens to his feet when swinging as Maya automatically brought his feet through his torso to get to the next keyframe.
I found animating the flip after the swing very difficult as I had to balance the up and right translations perfectly to make it look smooth and natural. I adjusted the arcs in the graph editor and deleted unnecessary keyframes so there were no sudden jumps and jack continued to move forward with the same momentum spiderman would have after exiting the swing. I also used a backflip tutorial to animate the arms correctly as it was difficult to see the exact placing of his arms from the back view in the game, so I needed to tuck them in more.
When landing, Maya automatically had Jack ease into the land which made it look unnatural. I broke the tangents in the graph editor so I could add sharper angles to the arcs affecting his land, meaning he wouldn’t ease into the land and the momentum was speeding up due to gravity instead of slowing down.
As for the landing, I analysed Andrew Garfield’s landing in No Way Home. Going frame by frame, I saw his body lowers first. he then leans forward and opens his arms for balance. When animating his landing, his feet seemed to slow down a little again before hitting the ground, so I made them hit the ground a frame sooner to fix this problem, then changed the timing of both feet hitting the ground, making his landing more natural. I used the same technique for his arms and shoulders as they wouldn’t be in sync either.
Reflection
As I was working on Assessment 1 before the Christmas holidays, I didn’t have time to receive feedback on my animations from my tutors. I did, however, use the knowledge from feedback I had received on previous walk cycles and body mechanics animations. I kept in mind weight and balance when animating, especially for the body mechanics landing, and how momentum builds before a landing, so an object will have an abrupt landing rather than slow down before hitting the ground. I also didn’t begin to add too many in-betweens before finalising the spacing of my cycles, as it would have made it much harder later on when there were many more keyframes to edit.
I feel my skills in areas where I needed more practice before have greatly improved since doing this assessment. I used to find weight and balance difficult, so being able to animate a landing from a tall height and add personalities to my walk and run cycles showed me where a body holds its weight when in different poses. I also needed to use many references during this assessment, whereas before I might have only used one video reference when animating. Since my inspiration was Spiderman, I was lucky that there was so many reference videos to use, which is one of the reasons my tutors were happy to let me animate a web swing.
The body mechanics element was definitely out of my comfort zone as it turned out to be the most difficult piece of animation I had done yet. However, as Spiderman is my one of my favourite games and some of my favourite movies, I knew it would motivate me to try something harder, rather than a jump I had done before.
If I were to do this assessment again, I would have liked to start earlier so I had time to receive specific feedback on my animations. As assessment one took up so much of my time, I found it difficult to make progress in this assessment before assessment one’s submission date. I did, however, find this assessment quite fun to do as I have always enjoyed 3D animation. Because of this, I feel I pushed myself even more to create a good outcome, and I am therefore very happy with the work I have produced this module.
Reference Images
Development Playblasts
Walk
https://ulster-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/long-a8_ulster_ac_uk/EixdaSH4snBEunvxBZNnd30B7_H6FIypy8Kj5Dypr_z2Pg?e=Uvf3VA
Run
https://ulster-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/long-a8_ulster_ac_uk/EgeMaIOVWV9LtksXPkJhLDoByFQnqaTSlP0sDI_15qjULQ?e=l3qpcW
Swing
https://ulster-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/long-a8_ulster_ac_uk/Eqra5f0SSXNCgFlMmGAy4toBtDf_fyJOV4294_qek8K38g?e=6btd03