Run and Jump!

 

Probably my favourite and least favourite at the same time. My run and jump was very time consuming, and my decision to make my character do a dive into a roll was very tricky to execute in a way that looked natural.

To start, I copied my run file and imported the gym equipment models from blackboard. Finding the distance moved by each foot in a step was made tricker as I hadn’t used whole numbers, but calculators make everything easier. I plotted out the displacement for every step and from there used the graph editor to make the movement cyclic and applied offset, so my run cycle moved at an appropriate speed for the movement. It was quite cool seeing my animation move like this, as I had done all of the others as treadmill cycles.

I allowed for a good run up before keyframing the final distance and starting the jump. At the speed I had animated Rain running, I knew I wanted something that believably continued her momentum, so decided to do a dive into a roll. I spent some time looking around on YouTube for a good reference, I wanted something that started from a run into a jump that actually got some height, but this was surprisingly tricky to find. I watched a lot of parkour videos, but there weren’t a lot that gave me a good view of the angles I needed to replicate them, until I found a video of someone breaking down how to perform the action that I was looking for. I screen recorded the section of his video that I needed, and slowed it down to get a good look at his movements. I ended up finding key poses and taking screenshots of them to import into my blend file to have the references easily visible as I worked. It was so helpful to see how the body arched in a dive, and how the legs followed over into the roll. However, there are some differences between how I approached my dive and the way he did his- for example, he jumped from two feet and stayed symmetrical the whole jump, but I had Rain jump from one foot as I was continuing from her run, so one of her legs was up leading the other. Because of this, her knee clipped through the top of the jump, so I had to do some adjusting, but it gave the appearance that she had put her knee on to the jump to help her get over it which I quite liked the look of, so I only brought her up to where her leg was resting on top of the jump rather than moving through it.

It was very tricky getting the arms of the model to cooperate, as I noticed that when I wanted to bend them the way the man in my reference did, the model’s arms twisted and stretched weirdly. I must have spent ages trying to find a way to make it work, but after a while opted to make it simpler for myself and keep them straight. The timing in my run was very regular, equally spaced keyframes, all very neat, but the jump departed from that entirely- I had to move the keyframes about a decent bit in order to get it to look right. I wasn’t sure how to approach the displacement after she jumps as well, as the speed the run had been looked silly when applied to her jump as well. I decided to try and use the one last step she takes before she leaves the ground like I had earlier with the run up, calculating the distance travelled in that step and moving her forward that much, then making it cyclic and extending with offset throughout the airtime of her jump, and this actually worked quite well. As I had animated her rolling at the end of it, it was quite easy to have her come to a stop. I simply continued the movement until she had finished her roll, and the way her back arched made it a very smooth stop. Initially, I had just had her legs come down and land flat in front of her, but after asking my partner to look over it, he suggested I have them land with a bounce to show their weight and the strength of the impact, which I just loved the look of after testing it.

I am so happy with the end result of my jump. If I were to approach it again, I think I would like to experiment with the arms more, finding different ways to position them during her roll. At this point however I was a little pushed for time as I had fallen behind while I was sick the week before the deadline. Nonetheless, despite being simple, I still think it works!

 

A link to the video I took my reference from-