Animated Studies

For this assignment we were tasked with creating two short animations; 1. Focusing on motion and body mechanics. 2. Conveying emotion and personality. This is my first time animating on Maya at university so I had to recap and relearn different processes to complete this task.

Body Movements and Motion Mechanics – Wall Running

I started by focusing on the body movements and motion mechanics animation first. In a lesson earlier in the year we were shown how to animate a character jumping, so I decided to re-watch these videos to help me produce a smooth jumping motion for the wall run. The first and most important thing I needed to get was a reference that was realistic and not from a video game so I went deep diving on the internet until I found a starting reference I was happy with.

Original reference video for wall running

Waist tracking sphere reference video

In the tutorial that we had been walked through, one of key parts of the process was to use a primitive sphere to block out the general motion of the main body of our character model which was the ultimate walker rig. I used the guy’s waist in the reference video as an anchor point and manually moved the sphere over his waist in a relative motion using animate.

Ball tracker without reference

This made me realise without the reference the balls movement was very simplistic and not as complex as I initially had thought. I then went about trying to work out how to make it more fluid. I watched a video “https://youtu.be/bgyrrjmavy4” which explained in detail that when performing a wall run you have the 3 basic fundamentals; 1. When running at a surface you want to wall run on you have to come at it from about a 45 degrees angle for most grip and contact with the surface. 2. Once your first foot hits the surface of the wall you need to absorb the force of the impact instead of releasing it so you don’t just jump back off the wall again. 3. When jumping off the wall at the end bring your hips back to your original starting position under you.

Annotation over reference

After completing all this prep work I was confident enough to start animating.

Starting Draft Side View

Starting Draft Perspective View

I started the draft trying to make the ultimate walker rig run towards the walls starting point at a 45 degrees angle as I had been shown in my research, this led to my first problem. The way the rig’s constraints had been set up it was impossible to get the rig to move in a straight line without the entire body deforming. I remedied the problem by taking out the running start, and having the rig just jump onto the wall instead. Even though this took away part of the realism to the wall run it was necessary in order to complete the animation and focus on the most important part the wall run itself. The initial jump onto the wall was fairly straightforward as I was able to utilise the squash and stretch methods I learnt in class to give the jump more realism. The running along the wall part was difficult as the rigs joint were finicky and difficult to position while angled on the wall, because of the I had on purposely slowed the animation down to get the most accurate feet and joint positioning. This led to a slight problem, as I didn’t know how to increase the animation speed without having to redo the entire animation. I decided to try and find a way around this and then in the end decided to leave it the way it was, as it showed the movement in the animation more clearly. The final part of the animation is when the rig jumps from the wall onto the ground, when I started the rigs jump off the wall I miss-calculated where the ground was and made the rig end the jump before it actually hit the ground. I initially tried to fix this problem by undoing a couple of animated keyframes and starting again but my laptop couldn’t handle it and kept crashing. So i decided to add the last bit of the animation showing the rig absorb the landing and move back to its original stance. This makes the end of the animation look a bit weird but i embraced the outcome as it was all I could do with the equipment I had at hand.

Final Animation

I was happy with my final outcome of this task, I know there are improvements to be made with it which I will learn from in the future. I think with better equipment I could have produced a more accurate wall running animation. The bit I most enjoyed about this task was animating absorbing the impact when jumping on and off the wall. This project has helped improve my skills and understanding of how both difficult and interesting body movement and motion mechanics can be in a short animation.

 

Conveying Emotions – Stomping Tantrum

Animated Influences and References

I was inspired by different pieces of animation from anime, movies, and video games. A lot of the animated characters in the anime I watched didn’t speak when portraying their emotions, instead more emphasis was put on the character’s movements, facial expressions, and small animated gimmicks. I looked into how these characters were drawn and animated and tried to recreate a stomping tantrum in 3D using the Monty_Rig. The characters that I took reference from below are Psyduck, Anna, Stewie, and Rainbow Brite. I decided to choose and recreate Rainbow Brite’s stomping tantrum, as I was intrigued to see how animating anger would turn out.

Confused

Excited

Fear/ Torment

Anger

Animation Process

First I set up the character in an upright standing position. The Monty_Rig has a simple control system that allows for easy body movements and positioning making it an optimal option for a new 3D animator such as myself. I followed Rainbow Brite’s stomping animation carefully as a reference changing the speed of the stomps to be more serious and less silly and childish. I also want to move the Monty_Rigs eyebrows in a way to give it a grumpy expression but they were locked in place so I had to find another way to emphasize its anger. I decided to look at anime and remembered that characters that are angry usually have a red “X” or a bulging vein. So I created a red x and made so that as the animation continued the x would get bigger. I finally applied the squash and stretch methods we had been taught in class to show the character almost exploding with anger before returning to a calm starting position.

Final Animation

I am impressed with how the animation study of conveying emotions turned out. It was interesting to try and rework 2D references to a 3D animated character rig. My favourite part of the animating process was the stomping motion of the legs and feet. I also enjoyed animating the red cross/ vein gimmick like what you see in anime to solve the problem with some parts of the Monty_Rig being locked. This project has improved my skills and understanding of how both fun and difficult conveying emotions in a short animation can be.