Animation Assignment –

 

Walk Cycle –

Walk Cycle – First Attempt

 

 

My first attempt at a walk cycle was with the Azri Rig. When Presented with the option of having her stay in or walk out of the global control. I opted to try making her walk out of it. As I figured this would give me more chance at understanding the centre of gravity and weight of the character. I also liked the idea of the feet being easier to animate. I didn’t get far with this animation before realizing that I wasn’t happy with it. So I decided to step away from the walk cycle for a bit only to later revisit it with a different Rig.

Santiago Calle – Waitress Rig

 

I really liked the look of this rig, not only because it followed a familiar rigging set up that I am used to. But also because the character had flat footed shoes, which I felt allowed for more dynamic and happy walk cycles.

When animating The Waitress, I wanted to make use of the props she came with. And so I tailored my animation to be able to eventually incorporate this. Again opting with the method of having her walk out of the circle to block the animation.

Poses

After blocking this out, I then began to move her back to the centre of the Global Control on each pose. This meant she would stay in the centre of the scene, which allowed for far easier polishing and fixing. Some of this polishing included –

Knee Pop Fixes 

Tie Animation Polish

Weird (Too Much)

Fixed

 

It was after a lot of various timing redos and tweaks that I began to think about how I was going to tackle her holding the two props.

After watching this video I attempted to recreate what he had done using constraints, however tweaked it slightly so that instead of the hand following the prop, the prop follows the hand. I did this for both the notebook and the pencil.

I then tweaked the positioning of the hands slightly until I was happy with them.

 

Final Walk Cycle Shots

Diagonal

Back

Front

LSide (Intended Angle)

RSide

 

Run Cycle –

Alex Salmar – Spider Gwen Rig

For my run animation, I wanted to try tackling a more stylised animation style, reminiscent of Into The Spider-Verse. So I thought downloading a Spider verse rig would help with this.

Reference –

 

For my inspiration I wanted to replicate the style of the running shown in this clip. Since it is super posed based, and quite jumpy yet fluid at the same time. I wanted to experiment and try to replicate this run in my own animation.

I started this animation off in 12 frames per second, to lean further into the stylized feel. However I eventually opted for 24 FPS as I felt it would look more aesthetically pleasing, and left more room for creating that smooth yet rough feel. One creative choice I made when creating this animation was to keep the feet grounded and flat during the beginning of the stretch poses, even though technically she should be on her toes. This was because it was an extremely fast movement, and I personally felt that the grounded feet helped to sell the speed she was gaining more. I unfortunately ran into timing issues when it came to this animation however. And so I don’t have evidence of these development decisions.

Final Run Cycle Shots

Run Back

Run Front

Run RSide

Run LSide (Intended Angle)

If I was to go back to this animation, I would adjust the timing of each stride, to ensure they are equal.

 

Body Mechanics –

 

Initial Idea Testing –

At the beginning I wanted to try animating a character lifting a heavy object for my Body Mechanics Animation. So I downloaded the Jill Rig.ma and got started.

Firstly I positioned Jill in a pose that I felt showed some character. Bringing the toes further in, correcting posture to give Jill an inquisitive look. Looking back I would’ve also tilted the head slightly to this effect.

I then started blocking the beginnings of a preparatory neck crack.

However after doing this, I decided to instead opt for further brain storming. To see if I could come up with another Body Mechanic idea.

Web Swinging Idea –

 

After further brain storming I decided to instead tackle a web swinging animation, as the idea of doing this excited me and seemed super interesting and fun.

Reference –

 

My most utilised source of reference was the Amazing Spiderman 2 web swinging scenes. As these scenes in my opinion tackle the traversal in a really interesting way, adding more realistic, flashy skydiving elements to Spidey’s movement.  Which seemed like a really fun thing to try to animate and implement in my animation.

Blocking –

Firstly was to come up with what the web swing scene would be. I immediately blocked out two poses inspired by the reference. The initial sky diving pose and the pose from the Slow Motion segment.

Early Animating –

Based off these two poses I decided to have Jill perform a swing from one of these poses into the other, and so I placed a floor under her, and a couple of quick buildings to show scale. Then began working on the general movement and arc of the swing.

As you can see from the video, the general blocking and timing of the web swing was coming together. However there were issues, such as the arc and momentum being inconsistent with the timing. As seen in the sudden shoot upward after the swing, that results in an abrupt halt at the top of the arc. However it was enough for me to begin wondering about framing and camera movement, so I decided to add a Camera 1 which would follow Jill close behind, and also sway to compliment her movement. However this camera view does allow you to closer see the issues with her overall movement.

 

Cameras that tracked Jill closely like this ended up helping a lot with the actual process of animating the Web Swing. As without them, the character moves to fast to keep up with, and so any attempt at achieving consistent movement was impossible as you couldn’t keep track of her. This is what inspired me to introduce another camera, Camera 2. Which was a side on view of Jill. This is the camera that I used to complete most of my early animation work on this scene, and utilizing it along with Camera 1 really allowed me to work on the details of this rapid movement, and smooth out/polish.

The following shot had a lot of work behind it, as I not only retimed the swing, but also repositioned both Jill and subsequently the cameras to allow for more cohesive movement, fixing the arc and many other things. Including making a stylised decision to allow a lot more time for the part of the swing closest to the ground, as although it may not make sense logically. I thought It allowed the viewer to digest what’s happening more, and overall better fulfils the web swinging trope. I also ironed out a lot of the strange glitchy movement as seen below

I also ended up redoing the finishing pose after adding an ending backward launch off the swing, so it fit better. And also adding two extra buildings.

Unfortunately I didn’t document these changes while doing them, as I got carried away and forgot to. But progressing from the last shot to this one was a huge leap in the development of this animation. This was also when I got my in class feedback on this animation. In which I was introduced to numerous ways in which I could improve my animation, which I tried my best to implement, and I feel I did so successfully.  During this feedback I also was introduced to the pan tool, which I used a lot when animating my character, particularly during the later stages of development.

I also changed the frame rate from 24 to 30, as I thought the rapid movement would benefit from being smoother. Especially after my mum mentioned that it goes by quite fast. I made a lot of other changes further down the line to this same effect of easy readability.  This resulted in half frames which needed to be fixed and were.

The Shot –

Animating and refining –

 

My next step was to essentially polish and further improve upon this animation. So to do this, I further tweaked and repositioned Jill, the arc, the timings and also giving her more airtime going into the swing as well as out of it.  I also again allowed even more time in the actual swing, while also adjusting the overall arc but most importantly the end of the initial swing, in which I added a bit of a backwards tug, to convey the momentum required to be beginning to go higher into the air again. I like to think you can feel this change.

Numerous other changes took place here, such as changing the positioning and gravity of her cannonball position to feel more organic. Accounting for momentum of her kicking her leg round in this movement. As well as the change in air friction when she’s in a ball going faster and rotating, compared to opened out and hitting the wind more. Also at the base of the swing, where she kicks her legs outward and swings her arms round, better implementing momentum and logic in those movements. Basically just a lot of big tweaks which hopefully helped to accentuate the action more.

 

 

Adding a Setting –

 

Before moving forward further I added a setting to not only enhance the scene but also to help me to better get a feel for the speed Jill is traveling, and the momentum/force she is being exposed to. Its not a perfect recreation, but I think it serves a good role.

Further Tweaks –

 

Camera Movement

It was at this stage I was beginning to rethink my camera movement, so I decided to experiment with rotating around Jill. While also not necessarily keeping her centre frame to allow more experimentation with framing.

While overall I ended up really happy with this experimentation, I ended up recalling one of them. Which is a subtle use of camera positioning, in which Jill is in the bottom right of the shot before launching herself to the top right of it. This was meant to exaggerate the leap off the swing, reflecting it in a sudden change in were the viewer is looking.

I ended up finding this a little too jarring and so ended up opting for a smoother more flowing camera movement.

Enhanced Jump

I used the centre global control to essentially further accentuate the jump off the swing. I felt this would better show off the super human strength spider man has. To do this I used the Graph Editor, so that it wouldn’t drastically change any of the other global control animation.

Before Jump

Changing Jump

After Enhanced Jump

 

Fixing Camera 1 after enhanced jump

Before Fix:

After Fix:

 

It was only in this moment that I realized I could’ve highlighted camera 1 and camera 2’s controls and moved them while moving the global controls to create less hassle, and so that is what I did from then on when making changes like this.

Further tweaks to the overall animation were also made, including the removal of the flailing at the top of the arc of the swing, being replaced for a more graceful look downward toward the street, which better transitions into the end pose I feel.

Hand Animation/Tweaks

I also began animating one of the hands during the fixing of camera 1. Realizing how much of a difference the hands can make to the fluidity of an animation. I started on animating the other one.

Seeing both the hands move I feel really adds life to the character and allows for more follow through and fluidity.

I also made numerous small tweaks, one of which being the hips which I rotated to display the momentum more

After I was happy with the movement, I decided to capture the play blasts

Camera 1 Play blast

 

Camera 2 Play blast

When capturing camera 2s play blast I had to move the buildings out of the way before doing so, otherwise the camera would go though them and ruin the shot.

 

Experimenting With Slow Mo –

 

After seeing these play blasts, I couldn’t help but feel as if I could’ve taken the scene further. Specifically in correlation with the original reference.

In this reference, there is a shot where Spiderman gets to the arc of his swing, and the movement switches to slow motion. And I wanted to push my animation further to replicate this.

Adding Slow Motion

To add the Slow Motion I selected the frames I wanted to be slow motion, and basically extended each of them. After seeing the slow motion played out, I adjusted the pose of Jill slightly so it not only better complimented the new timing emphasis, but also the framing of Camera 1 overall.

However after seeing this same pose in Camera 2, it looked quite off. And so I tried to streamline it more.

While doing this I ran into numerous issues with subtle knee pops, which took a while to figure out how to fix. However after adjusting the hip position and rotation of the feet the knee pops seemingly became less noticeable. I also tweaked slight issues with head movement.

However when seeing this change in Camera 1, it was immediately clear I had lost that cinematic posing of the first attempt.

 

So I decided to meet in the middle a little bit, and created a nice pose in Camera 1, that seemed to somewhat still work with Camera 2s perspective. However I do still think the earlier streamlined shot looks better from Camera 2s angle.

Camera 1 

Camera 2

 

Final Body Mechanics Shot –

Conclusion –

Overall I’m really happy and proud of how my animations turned out, I feel I’ve learned a lot form these animation exercises. If I was to make one change it would probably be to allow myself more time on the running and walking animations, to not only better document them for the blog, but to also improve the finished animation. However with that in mind, I’m still super happy with the work I’ve produced this year and I’m excited to keeping experimenting more and learning.