Reflective Research Blog- Week 6

Starting off this module I was stressed, to say the least. Last term I had animated a short with classmates but this animation was different, this included legs, not something I ever thought would be a big deal. To start off, on week one, I was worried that this entire module would be in 2D and we would be using toon boom but I was pleasantly surprised that I had the option of doing the module in 3D, a huge relief. In this blog, I’ll share my first experience of making 3D walk cycles and reflect on the struggles, and experiences gained along the way.

 

On week two the class jumped right into walk cycles, it was a lot to learn very quickly and I definitely felt like I had been thrown into the deep end, but another part of me was so excited that I was learning how to do this, it’s the first steps to really understanding animation. Although I’ve spent years drawing anatomy, making it move was harder than I thought. I think I struggled the most with the fluidity of the cycles. I got the Animators survival kit (1) over the summer as a present and thank god I did. The book became a lifeline for almost everything, not just the walk cycle but all four of my cycles, and it helped me to understand the movement of the body.

 

The vanilla walk cycle surprisingly was the most difficult for me. I began the cycle in class using The Animator’s survival kit as a reference (1), the book is incredible but I did struggle a bit with the fact that it was in 2D. I felt as though there was a lot more I had to worry about when animating the cycle in 3D so I turned to YouTube for a bit of help. I found so many videos, the best being ‘Easy walk cycle’ (2) which helped a lot. I found the walk to be unnatural looking at some stages, confused, I got in contact with Alec and asked for feedback as well as a few of my friends. The feedback I received was mostly about the arms moving a bit too much and the legs being stiff. With that, I shortened the length to which the arms went, and with the legs, I had to turn to the graph editor. I talked to Alec about how to use the graph editor and he sent a video to the class group chat. Beforehand I couldn’t understand how to focus on one spline, but with his video, I was able to figure it out. The graph makes a major difference to the speed and fluidity of the cycle. I was able to go from a stiff walk to a smooth and natural which was very rewarding. I rendered out the cycle but saw a click in the right leg so i checked my keyframes at the start and the end was identical. Alec said to check that I was rendering out at frame 35 and not frame 36, which I did but unfortunately, there is still a click in the leg. Unfortunately, the one part of the feedback which didn’t help was that I asked why when my file got rendered there was a skip in the step that didn’t appear in the blender file. Alec said to check that I ended the keyframes at the correct place which I knew I did so I got to work and messed around with the graph and fixed the glitches as best as I could with the limited knowledge I had.

 

The walk cycle with personality is my proudest cycle, I feel like I did a good job executing it and worked with all of the feedback I received. I began by researching walk cycles with personality, it took a while to settle on one, thinking I could do a zombie walk but ultimately I settled on a tiered walk. I used the walk cycle video (4) as my primary reference, taking screenshots at different stages in order to get the contact pose all the way to the up position. I loved this reference because it showed three separate angles of the character which I used to make sure my cycle looked perfect. I asked Alec for some feedback, a bit confused as to why the arms of my character looked a little off. Alec sent a video back full of suggestions and feedback about the animation. Changing the arms from IK to FK was his main suggestion, this threw me massively, I had already completed the walk cycle using IK and he told me to keep the arms in FK unless the animation looked absolutely perfect. So, I got to fixing my work. It took a while but eventually, I managed to re-do the arms in FK, Alec also said to play with the graph editor to get the feet to move at a better pace and to add a floor. Once I added a floor I realised my feet were going right through it. Without Alec’s feedback, I would have never noticed the feet so I gladly got to moving the keyframes up on the z axis. When working with the graph editor, i had no idea how to work it, everything online told me the shortcuts on how to enlarge certain splines but because I work on a Mac book I don’t have the same keyboard. Once again, I turned to Alec for some help and he made a video explaining exactly how to work the graph editor so I got to work. Once I got the hang of it I began to understand it way more, happy with the results I was getting, I didn’t realise how much it would affect the animation but I learned it is a really important aspect of animation. The change in the graph editor allowed my legs to stay on the ground a little longer which reflected a lot more emotion in the character, conveying laziness, something only changing the graph curves could fully show.

 

Running was my next cycle, and stressed about the workload of my class I didn’t delay this any longer. Once again I used The Animator’s survival kit (1) as my main source of reference but again found it wasn’t quite enough for doing the project in 3D, thankfully Alec posted a lot of slides for the class that week and I got the most perfect reference, showing two angles of the Rain rig. I used PureRef (5) to have the reference on screen at the same time as the blender application. After following the reference the animation remained a little stiff, with what I learned from previous cycles I knew this was another job for the graph editor. Alec posted a lesson to Blackboard, showing how he made his run cycle smoother so I followed his lecture and was able to complete the run cycle with ease. I really enjoyed being able to complete my cycles faster each time. I also watched a run cycle on YouTube (6) and took reference from its legs in my own run cycle.

 

Finally came the run cycle with personality. My worst enemy. I think I went through a midlife crisis with this one. It took me a long time to settle on what type of run to do, I began with an angry run, easy. I took my run cycle and altered the posture to bend at an angle, I curled the fists and voila, I was finished. After talking to my friends, it turned out to be way too similar to my run cycle, which was very understandable, I tried taking the easy way out but thankfully I moved on. Next, I went with a ninja run cycle. I took inspiration from the Naruto run, I found a video of a run cycle made by another animator online (7) I really liked how it was going but of course, I decided I could do better. Looking back I really should have stuck to that run cycle but unfortunately, I did not. I talked to a friend of mine doing Shaggy from Scooby Doo and he suggested I do Velma, so with that, I got to researching references. This was difficult because it’s a 2D animation, and quite old, the references were not great. I used a singular YouTube video as a reference, it was just a clip of Velma running, (8). After a few days of animating I finished, happy with my work, I thought I had completed everything until my friend said his feedback was to stay away from the scooby doo characters. I was devastated, I had made it look great but Aodhan was right, he said that the animators used to cut corners due to low budget and because of that, recreating the cycle in 3D did not look great. With that, I began another search for a cycle. It took a few days, I asked my friends what I should do, and suggestions came pouring in, Phoebe from friends was a good one but I just did not have good enough references and I couldn’t get a good enough recreation when trying to film myself for reference. Eventually, a friend of mine suggested Monsters Inc., and I brushed it off but then I remembered that the Monsters Inc. animators released test animation reels with Sully running to see what his fur would look like. (9) I only had one angle of Sully running so I took videos of my parents running towards me and their side profiles To get the arm movements correct. I struggled a lot with this one, doing it so late after completing the others didn’t help either, I texted Alec and got another feedback video, showing how to edit the graph to fix the feet which I did and that definitely helped. Alec suggested I change the hair flow to look less wavy and I used his run cycle hair as an example previously so I then went through and altered it to give it a less flowy look. Alec mentioned that my arms needed fixing, he was right. I struggled so much getting the right angle and the video reference of my dad had low arms as well so I made them higher, made the fingers claw more and adjusted the elbows. I think the front-facing angle of the animation looks great but the side had a lot of problems and the feedback definitely improved that problem a lot. When it came to speed I tried scaling the keyframes to speed it up but it looked too jumpy, only having a frame to change position so I went to the internet for help. I found a hack that allowed me to edit the speed through time stretching. The old was set to 100 so I moved the new to 75, this sped up the animation but it didn’t loop so I changed the end keyframe to 25% lower than my original to get a good loop and still make the animation faster. This allowed me to undo the sped-up version at any moment and even alter the speed if I wanted to without moving any keyframes at all.

 

This project taught me more about animation than I ever thought it would, it also taught me a lot about patience. The feedback I received throughout the process of my animation was extremely helpful and overall is the reason I was able to make the cycles flow better than I would’ve before. I think the timeframe that I had to complete this project was a bit too short though, 50% of my grade this early on proved extremely stressful but I also have to say that the time crunch forced me to learn how to work well under pressure, after all in the future walk cycles may only take me a few minutes to complete… here’s to hoping. I can’t express how much I have learned in the last few weeks, creating projects I never thought I would be able to do. Having the rain rig accessible was a life changer, knowing that the rigging was already done. I did enjoy this project and was delighted with the speed with which Alec was able to provide me with feedback I feel I applied every bit of feedback I received to my project in order to provide the lecturers with the best quality of work I could do. This assignment also made me realise how important references are, without them i doubt id be able to make anything look natural. I am stressed but delighted with the amount I learned about blenders in this assignment, I feel like my progress really shows in my work from week 2 to week 6.

References

1. Williams, R. (2001). The Animator’s Survival Kit. 3rd ed. Macmillan
2. Carlino, J. (ed.) (2021) Easy walk cycle, character animation with Blender, YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRtT7Gr6S2o (Accessed: 16 October 2023).
3. Animation Tutorials, I want to be an Animator. (2021) 16 walk cycles – different attitudes, YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XDrUs5kMZI&t=18s&pp=ygUOMTYgd2FsayBjeWNsZXM%3D (Accessed: 18 October 2023). 
4. SlothArt (2021) Run cycles – animation, YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVk2qxH2YUU (Accessed: 24 October 2023). 
5. All your reference images in one place. (no date) PureRef. Available at: https://www.pureref.com/ (Accessed: 23 October 2023). 
6. Z, C. (2021) 3D girl cartoon character – run cycle, YouTube. Available at: https://youtube.com/shorts/Y5dm4P-ExoA?si=vOUCaqzDeLNEPb3U (Accessed: 04 November 2023). 
7.  Nguyễn, Á. (2020) Ninja Run Cycle Animation | Naruto Run, YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEZv6bbCP8A (Accessed: 26 October 2023). 
8. Erhdoc (2021) Velma just runs different, YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9C09ns4MxY (Accessed: 29 October 2023). 
9. Monsters, Inc. – CGI making of (2001) (2019) YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzLp5GQ9AnE&t=354s (Accessed: 01 November 2023).