Assignment 2 – Animation Studies

Movement Animation

To begin this assessment, I had to decide what I wanted to animate, I had a few ideas of movements I wanted to do like a figure skating jump and spin, but I decided to do a run, jump and trip. I started by looking up references of people running, jumping and falling. These are all images and gifs I found on the internet. After finding these I looked on YouTube for tutorials on how to animate run cycles, jumping and falling.

Rough Blocking Out

I started by roughly blocking out my idea with a sphere and two ovals, this helped me to nail down my idea and roughly work out the timing of the movement. I found this step very helpful as I could then reference the Monty rig and mimic the movements made by the rough character.

I like the look of the movement so far, it looks smooth and the timing worked well, I think it will need adjusted when more frames are added but it looks good so far.

Blocking Out with Monty

Next, I blocked out the movement with the Monty rig, I reference the rig, so I could not break as easily. I followed what I had done for the rough block out very closely as it already captured what I wanted quite well; however, I did change the timing a bit as the run had to be a bit faster.

I think it looks good so far as the movement move smoothly, I need to adjust the run as he doesn’t hit the ground very hard and he looks a little weightless, I will adjust this in the graph editor at a later stage.

Inbetweens

I then started to add inbetweens to the animation and tweak some of the positions as some did not look right. I spread the feet a little as this made him look more natural, I also made his knees move in and out when he jumps. I fixed one of Monty’s legs when he jumped as it looked stiff. I also used the foot roll feature as it made the animation look smoother.

The movement looks good and the foot roll looks natural and helps Monty look heavier when hitting the ground.

Squash and Stretch

Next, I added some squash and stretch to Monty, I used it mainly when he crouches to jump and lands. I also added it when he runs as I wanted his body to compress a little when he hits the ground as it would give him more weight. When Monty trips and hits his head off the ground, I made him flatten a little as I wanted the impact to be quite hard.

I like the squash and stretch as it adds a lot of weight and energy to Monty.

Polish

To tweak the movement of the animation I adjusted the graph editor for the body and feet to give him more weight when he runs and jumps, this made him look less floaty.

Lastly, I made his brow move up and down when he moves to add more personality to Monty. I also made his eyes clench when he jumps and lands. I also adjusted the run as he dipped down to low, it made it look a little unnatural.

Overall, I think the movement animation turned out well. The timing looks good and the facial expressions fit. If I was to do this again, I would mess with the graph editor more as I think I was playing it safe as I don’t fully understand how to work it.

Emotion Animation

For this task I looked into the emotion of sadness, to start I referenced different gifs of other people’s interpretation of sad walking. I also reference the character Sadness from the movie Inside Out. The main feature of a sad walk seems to be a lowered head, swaying from side to side, dragging their feet and moving slowly. With all this in mind I started to block out my animation. I gathered some gif of the actions I wanted to convey from the internet and then went onto YouTube to look up some more references.