So with my character all rigged, I could work on some animation experiments and tests while I waited for my team to get their characters finished up.
First Test
3D animation isn’t my strong suit as I have found out, so I knew I would need to have a couple bits of practice before I got stuck into my final animation with my group. The main thing I had wanted to get down well, was the tilted movement of my character and its stand. I had a lot of issue trying to get this how I wanted in my head so I did one pass on this (which was pretty awful) before looking to Mike’s Tilt Cube example file and trying to use his keyframes and learn the type of movement he created so I could create a version by myself.
Sound Warning: Loud buzzing noise, MUTE before playing
So I first started my getting my Tilt Ctrl animated with the back and forth rotation.
Then I added in forward movement with the Master Ctrl.
Then I added in some movement on the body, the spine arms neck and head, for this test I was going for this ragdoll movement so it is very loose and deadweight.
I had also noticed that my look at controller go left behind, this is because it was made from empties and not connected ot my main rig, so I had made a note to adjust this for my second animation test pass.
Here I added in some secondary and overlapping action, the ears, eyes, hair, bags, etc. As well as getting some eye movement.
Then I had thought that this was looking too quick so I increased the amount of frames and scaled my keys to fit.
Here I messed around with the graphs, and I really wasn’t a fan of this to be honest. I still struggle with these graph editors so I will need to make sure I have the Master Ctrl animated exactly how I want it before moving onto the rest of the body. It does give an interesting view of this type of movement even if I didn’t like the outcome.
So I had thought that this was going to be an easy fix, I was very wrong. I initially went and added the look at controller to my rig and had thought this would work, but this wasn’t the case. The controller ended up moving very slow and you would have to move it a lot to get it to rotate even a bit. So I thought the way to fix this was to go and apply all the transforms, but there was an issue with this as well as it ended up moving my eyeball very far away from the model and that’s not what I wanted at all. So, I had looked online for a fix and no luck their either, including trying to learn about Delta Transformation.
Apply or remove Delta transformation
by u/felipehez in blenderhelp
It was after quite a lengthy troubleshoot session in the Uni discord with lots of help from one particular person (thank you so much) that I found the issue I was having. I needed a bone for the eyeballs, this never occurred to me as being something that I needed so I’m very happy to learn that this was the one issue, so I went and made new bones, new vertex groups and set these up with the same name. Then I parented the eye bones and look at controller to the head and the L/R eye controllers to the look at controller. Then it was all fixed!
Second Test
With all this troubleshooting done I could go and do my second attempt at my characters movement.
I went and played around with my models and I think my mesh itself could have benefitted from having extra loops on the elbow bends, so I noted this for my future models, to not shy away from adding in faces to make sure I get the nice smooth functionality.
I wanted to have a redo of the walk because I wasn’t happy with the first pass. so I did another pass. This first attempt I thought had too sharp twists and didn’t have a nice flow.
For this attempt I approached it similarly to the ball bounce exercise from way earlier in the semester. I went and blocked the up and down bounces first, then worked on the forward movement, all animated on the Master CTRL.
I then went and added the rotation on the tilt control, for this i wanted to have an upward tilt as it would lift from the ground, horizontal at the peak height, downward tilt for landing then horizontal again, for this I also had to go back and edit the movement from the pervious step so that it would have a smoother stop and start.
I then went and edited the graph to have a bit smoother easing, allowing the curves on top to have more space while still giving the stiffness of the base movement to keep us in mind that it is a figure.
I then wanted to do a run example using these same frames so I just scaled the frames smaller, I’m not sure how I feel about this run since it is such a stiff base movement without the squash and stretch.
I went back to my normal speed movement and just went about animating the rest of my model. The idea was to recreate her walking around looking at the dungeon and being intrigued and I think this worked pretty well, I like how her facial expressions came out.
I then also did a pass where I tried to add some drag on the googles with my rig. I’m not happy with how this ended up looking compared to what I had wanted to achieve, the idea was to have the goggles in the air as she’s landing, having them hanging in the air for a bit before dropping quickly, and it didn’t come out this way so I will look to try and achieve this effect a bit better.
Third Test
For my third test I wanted to practice the opening frames, since it had the slant. I went and used my last version of the dungeon file which was unfinished, but worked for my practice. I brought in my rig and placed it in the right spot using the master control.
Then using the process of my second animation I went and blocked out the movement on the slope. I used the previs to have my timings correct for the camera.
I then went and blocked out the second shot as well, but I didn’t like this slow movement so I decided to go with the ‘run’ that I had practiced earlier as well.
The way I made the run was by mapping out the frames in the normal timing and just scaling them all down together. I think this gives the comedic/cute value that I wanted from this second shot so it works for now. The main concern I had while animating this was that it might look too stiff with the base, since we didn’t have any squash and stretch on the rig, as I had asked the team if we should and we all agreed that the baseplate should remain stiff.
With the movement blocked the next step was to get the tilt all sorted out.
Then I added some extra secondary movement to give her a bit more life, animating the ears, head, expression and spine.
Here I refined those secondary actions and then also went and added in some arms swings, to break apart that stiff feeling I was getting from the movement.
I then thought that the running was a bit too stiff and choppy so I increased the cap of the time and I decided I liked the second version of this more. I think extending this time will help with my biggest issue in animation, which is the timing between movements and it is something that I really struggle with.
I then went ahead and added these same arm movements to the starting shot of this as well as some body and head rotation to break up the stiffness (in my actual pass on this I will go and add the overlapping action for the ears, hair and such). I also fixed the camera for this, as originally I had this set too far out and I think this looks like a pretty good example for what my actual animation will look like. I think it does look a bit too choppy and stiff with how we decided to approach the no leg animation rule, but it does give the appearance of these mini figs moving .
Third Test
I also then thought that because this was too stiff, If I added some squash and stretch on the baseplate that this might help give a bit more personality and life to my model. I’m not really sure how I feel about this but I went ahead and added the ability to Squash and Stretch onto my main so that I could have this ability to add it if I wanted to.