Flour Sack

This week’s tasks were a flour sack movement and pushing a heavy object. We were allowed to choose what action the flour sack did as long as it had strong lines of action and showed some personality. I chose to animate a jump. 

Research

I watched Mike’s tutorial and looked up some flour sack jump movement paths to reference as I animated. 

 

Process

I started by blocking out the motion and timing, not worrying too much about the limbs or posing the body as I wanted to get the timing right.

 

I then moved onto posing the body and limbs to create lines of action during the key poses. I also added some squash and stretch as the flour sack jumped and landed.

 

 Lastly, I used to graph editor to clean up the movements and sharpen the fall of the flour sack. 

 

Outcome

Overall, I am very pleased with the flour sack jump. The timing looks good, and the key poses have strong lines of action. I do think it could have done with a bit more follow through at the end as he stops quite quickly. 

 

 

Pushing a Box

For this task we had to animate a character pushing a heavy stone forward.

Research

I looked up some references and tutorials on how to make a character appear like they are struggling to push something. I also watched Mike’s tutorial that explained child-of constraints. 

 

Process

To start I ignored the stone box and blocked out the key poses, the timing is very important to get right as this is what makes the box look heavy as well as the posing of the character.

 

Next, I added the child-of constraint onto the wrist bone, this snape the hand to the target so no matter where the wrist moves the box will follow. I added some in-betweens to smooth the movement and worked on cleaning up the animation, focusing on how the hand interacted with the box. 

 

Also, I used the graph editor to touch up the whole animation.

 

Outcome

Overall, this animation turned out great, the character comes across as if he is struggling with the box. However, his head merges quite a lot with the box, I feel as though I could have tweaked its position to help lessen this issue.