Heavy Lift Continued
This week I continued making progress on my lifting animation. After making changes to the timing based on my feedback last week, I was ready to start animating other movements within my animation. I started off with the hands. Before now, I hadn’t bothered to animate the hands. This meant that they clipped through the characters hips at the start of the animation and it never looked like the character was actually grabbing the box.
I went back to the start of the animation and adjusted the positioning of her hands and fingers so that it was obvious that she had her hands on her hips. I then adjusted the poses of the fingers at different points in the animation so that her fingers actually wrapped around the box as she lifted it. I then made a playblast to check my progress:
Although this does look much better, there are still some errors that I need to fix. After getting some feedback from my peers, one of them pointed out that at certain points in the animation her hands aren’t actually touching the box, making it look like the box is floating. This should be an easy fix and I’ll be able to fix it in the graph editor later on.
Next I decided to work on her hair and her eyes. It took a couple of attempts to get the hair right as it felt like every time I fixed hair clipping in one frame, it would cause more clipping to occur in a later frame. I then managed to fix this issue when I made some adjustments to the hair in the graph editor.
I was initially nervous to work on the eye movements as I planned to have Azri look down at the box, and then look back up again as she lifted the box off the ground. I had never animated eyes on a rig like this before, so I was worried that I’d end up having the eyes look in different directions. Fortunately this was not the case and it was actually quite easy to animate the eyes thanks to the simple control system. All I had to do was move the control to the spot that I wanted Azri to look at, and both of her eyes would focus on that spot.
I’m quite happy with the progress so far, all that is left to do is to animate the clothing and make some final adjustments in the graph editor.
I then started on the final part of this animation, the clothing. I really struggled with the clothing this time due to the controls disappearing. I managed to animate the cloak that she wears so that it no longer clips the upper body, which I’m happy with. However, I did have issues with the skirt. Although I manage to fix some of the clipping that was happening at the back, I struggled to completely fix the clipping that occurred at the front. The positions of the controls moved to follow the movements of the body to a certain extent, however this resulted in certain controls completely disappearing from view in certain frames due to the exaggerated movements in the legs. Whenever I tried to make the controls go back to their original position, it would cause the skirt mesh to break entirely.
I also had some issues when starting new attempts animating the clothing. Whenever I exited the file without saving so I could start fresh, there were still times that the clothing was still animated in certain parts when I opened the file again despite me never saving anything from my previous attempts (I don’t have the autosave feature turned on either, so I don’t know why this was happening). This ended up making the process more difficult and time consuming than necessary, as I then had to go back and make sure that each control in the skirt was set to the default values for every frame.
I did my best to fix the clipping in some frames, but I couldn’t fix every frame without breaking the skirt mesh. Thankfully the worst of the clipping can’t be noticed from the front angle as it gets mostly covered by her arm and the box as she bends down.
I also went back and made some final adjustments in the graph editor. I made some fixes based on previous feedback and managed to adjust her arm movements so that her hands are always in contact with the box as she lifts it up. Once I finished making these adjustments, I made a final playblast:
Final Heavy Lift Animation
Front view:
Side view:
I think that this animation was a good body mechanics study, however if I had more time I would go back to make some improvements. I think that with more time, I could improve the ending with Azri getting back up again as I think the timing and posing of the character could be improved. I definitely found this study to be the most difficult out of the three animations for the assignment and although I do believe this to be the weakest out of the three, I have learnt a lot from this study and I have a better understanding on how to portray weight in animation.