In our second section, my character is only seen in one shot, so I went ahead on worked on this before Tori as she was still trying to sort out some other elements.
Arms/Movement
With my first and fourth scene done I had wanted to change about the entrance keys, to get a better feeling of this slowing moment as my character was curious of her surroundings. I went ahead and did some experiments on how to approach this. I played around with the timing, the rotation, the location and the spacing of different keys to find what could work best. I think I liked the last pass that I had done on this but I wasn’t completely sure so I went and sent these to two of my team members for some feedback with different perspectives.
I went and sent them each of these versions with numbers (seen in the above order) as well as the original for some reference.
From these responses I went ahead and looked again and created a final version and this was definitely better. I also went ahead and added on an extra 12 frames, because I did want to add more time and Kori thought so too, so I went ahead and added on these, since I wasn’t adding any more animation and just holding the frame (we could also go and cut this out in editing if need be).
Body/Head
I then went ahead and worked on the body and head movements, my idea was to make it look like she was looking around the new environment. I started off by wanting her to look at the bottle in the corner, then the ‘roof’ of the ceiling and then the wall closer to the camera. The first pass I did on this, I felt, looked too much like she was snapping to look at certain elements and not as if she was exploring (kind of like she was acting but not actually emoting).
To fix this I went ahead and added in some more keys to control this movement better, as well as editing the graphs to smooth out some of the movement.
There was still something off about this movement, so I decided to remove this upward look movement. I thought that this might be too quick and action for her to complete in the time, since the idea was to have her slowly gazing about in this new area, and taking in the environment. I went and removed the upward look (since we also didn’t have a ceiling, this only brought notice to this), in favour of have more time to look around the frame, and this looked a lot more natural.
Arms
While I had managed to put some arms in by pasting in the rotation information from my work on the fourth section, Eoin ended up pulling the file back to work on some lighting, and upon starting on the file properly I wanted to change up the movement. I went ahead and adjusted these arm movements to the new timing of my character, as well as adjusting the swings to decrease the swing as she slowed down to match this momentum. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with her arms, since this was supposed to be just a neutral placement I just left them loose at her sides.
I went and added in some finger movement, to have them curl as the arm curls forward, and open as it goes back. Again, I wasn’t to sure how to recreate the neutral arm position so I went and made her curl her hands into fists and hang loose ( this is something that I find myself doing when standing sometimes), it isn’t perfect, but it also isn’t too over the top which works for me.
Face
The face was pretty simple to do for me, you can’t exactly see these movements clearly since she is just a background character. Her eyes look straight ahead the move to look at the bottle, and also guide the movement before the head moves, as if she looks before actually following along. The mouth opens as if she’s jogging and taking in breathe, before staying a bit open as she gazes around in wonder and then the eyes open a bit and she smiles a bit as she is interested in her surroundings. Even if she can’t be seen I wanted to put effort in to give her personality and life.
Hair
The first thing I did with the hair was actually my little hair curl, I went and had a couple attempts at getting this just right, to try and mimic the movement of my character but also keeping in mind how I had animated it swaying in my section 4 work. Then I played with the graph editor a bit to get this all smoothed to how I liked it and I could move onto the hair poofs.
For the hair poofs, I copied the values of the keys from another file and then worked to adjust and time these out appropriately. I added in some drag for when she moves her head and slowed down the bounces a bit as well.
Bag and Dagger
Then I went and animated in the dagger and bag movements, making them bounce and move with the body movement. These both have less reactive bounces as the momentum slows down, but its a bit more subtle, (Below just shows off the bag animation).
Accessories
Again, even though most of these details won’t be picked up on camera, I wanted to animate all the nice accessories! To showcase these I went and set up a quick tracked camera to the face so that I could show off these movements. The most prominent here is the loop earrings and them swaying side to side, I did exaggerate this a fair bit since I liked the idea of the being quite loose and floppy, and just roughly tried to move these in line with the movements as well as the rotation of the body. There is also some rotation on the rose ring, but I only had this rigged for forward and backward movement, so having these all as bones instead of shape keys should have been the approach that I went for here, so I just made a note of this for future projects.
Then this is them for the camera shot, not noticeable at all unless you look super close for them.
Ears
Now, for some reason one area I really struggled with was animating the ears. I’m not sure why this ended up like this, but I just struggled trying to get what I wanted this movement to look like in Blender. I used the base rotation values from another file and first, but then these didn’t end up working for me so I went and just recreated these with rotations on the same-ish keys ( landing, taking off, in the air and on the ground), getting to this stage took a suprising amount of time of which I am not proud of, but at least it worked. Also note here I changed the background colour just so I could read it a bit better.
With the up and down movement sorted I needed to then get the back and forth movement, that made it so my ears moved in nice arcs with drag. Looking back at all of the different renders I made, the changes are so minimal, and not noticeable. I can’t believe I got so focussed on adjusting graphs, changing keys, changing values and multiple versions created on these- i guess there is a lesson in this of how when you are working consistently on the little details you can miss the big picture and waste a lot of time, and that taking breaks from work or getting others to have a look can save a lot of wasted time.
In the end, I went ahead and decided to settle, keep this as is and see if I can fix the problem area if we have time at the end. What is the problem? To me when she comes through the door, and looks to the bottle the ear seems to pair and have this whiplash effect that I think negatively effects the moment (Tori said I was being silly and she didn’t see this at all, I trust her word so letting it be was the best approach). This ended up being my shot for this section, one more to go and Fidget is fully animated, with some adjustments just needed to be added if there is time (since we are running a bit behind what I would have liked).
With that, this is how my character’s movements are looking for the first two sections, I actually really like how it is coming together and I am excited to see how it will look as more of my group’s characters start to get added in.