For our second part of our module, we’re focusing on body mechanics mainly weight lifting and jumping. Again like before, I have never tackled in any of these area of animation but hopefully by the end of this module I’ll be much more confident in doing some personal exercises on these and improving my skills ☻ Again I’ll most likely be leaning into 2D animation for this half again so if there’s a lack of 3D, I try my best in those exercises but I am focusing on the 2D more.
BLOCKING/STORY TELLING POSES
We did briefly look at the keyframes/blocks in the previous part of this module with the walks and runs, but it feels like this time I have to work out my own frames without any reference so I went into looking at story telling poses which are the main poses that allows the viewer to understand what the action is leading to. In this video below it shows how the drawn timeline in animation is used also how and when to apply more in-between frames.
WEIGHT LIFTING
For my class exercise on week 7, we were looking into some story telling poses and blocking which I didn’t really get done due to focusing on my other module and some funky personal stuff. Here is the keyframes but I did speak to my lecture about what areas to focus on when adding in the other frames which were noting down the timing and adjusting frames such as where I should let the frames hang longer for, where needs extra frames to create a smoother flow.
While 3D, I was provided a few files to get use to this add on to blender and also practise key framing. In this exercise file there was already a few keyframes provided while I just needed to adjust the timing and add in subtle detail to show some type of resistance from the weight of the ball and push some poses:
JUMP
For the jump, we were provided with a reference to try and animate. The recommended way to animate this was use a single line to capture the line of action and the animate on top. As seen in my exercise the orange line behind the blue. I’m still missing probably a handful of frames to make it even more smooth but since it’s an exercise, I believe I had the idea down.
My main problem is that I care about anatomy too much instead of trying to capture the action through my lines for now. I’m not sure how to work around it but maybe I’ll go back to drawing simple stickmen for a rough sketches. Since week 8 we didn’t look at jumps in 3D, I went around for some videos of jumps in 3D which would give me a rough idea of how they’re planned out.
From the video here I can see the blocking of the idea then translated into 3D which is pretty neat. It seems like the blocking is the main part I need to pay the most attention to capture the story and character so maybe this half of the assignment it wouldn’t be as clean as my walks and runs. While watching this video I also saw a few other videos that caught my attention.
Comparing these two videos we can see they’re both jumps but both are very different. Still both used 7 keyframes to capture the jump and then multiple in-betweens to make it even more smooth.