Alec asked us to start working on a jump as practice for the body mechanic assignment:
This was the initial Blocking.
This was after using tween machine, which felt extremely helpful.
We were given some 3D exercise centered around Graph Editor, Arcs, Follow Through etc:
I also had some jump animations from my classes in Berkeley College:
I spent some time researching reference for the body mechanic that I am planning on doing for this assignment:
I started blocking out my body mechanic animation:
First pass was ok, but needed more slow movements between Ali kneeling down and standing up, which was advised by Alec.
After adding more frames between kneeling and standing, I tried to add a little sway a she reaches her peak height. I feel that there needs to be more done to convey the extra weight, Gig looks like he doesn’t weigh very much now. Although, he is not heavy. I will ask for more feedback from Nial this afternoon.
I spent a bit of time going over the arcs of Ali’s movement up into the standing pose, and I also took out a few frames between kneeling and standing — it felt a little too slow for me. She’s not out of shape and gigabyte isn’t particularly heavy, and therefore she shouldn’t be encumbered either by weight or joint pain. Nial also gave me some great feedback on Ali’s lift from the floor, advising that I should aim to have her front foot planted on the floor at all times to give the view of stability:
I need to work more on the timing of Ali finding her balance, but overall I’m vaguely happy with the timing here – I mapped out all of the important poses in red so that I was able to track Ali’s right leg.
I spent some time over the holidays going over my body mechanic animation, roughing out Ali’s forms a little more and smoothing out some movements. I’m still a little unhappy with the sway at the peak of her ascent, and think the fix for this may be planting one of her feet more strongly in one place, as it looks a little like they are sliding? however overall I’m pretty pleased with the animation as a whole – I’m going to really try and keep the subtle secondary movement I have in Ali’s hair as I really like the effect. I want to ad a little more movement to her body when she turns her head and then when she looks down, as I think it’s quite stationary and there’s not a lot of expression within it.
I spent the past few days finishing up my body mechanics animation, with feedback from Alec:
I still think her catching her balance at the peak could have been done a little better, and I think in some places my timing is a little off, but overall I’m really pleased with how this came out!
I feel as though I didn’t have as much time to go in and refine this as much as my other loop animations, because it was pretty confusing at some stages and I spent a lot of time making it look ‘right’ rather than smaller details. If I could do this project again, I would have dedicated more time to timing and in-betweens in this post.
