With the first animated cycles, we did a walk and run cycle.
With each of these animations, we had an option of completing them using a variety of pre built rigs. For my run cycle I chose the Jill rig, and for the walk cycle I chose the Azri rig.
These animations both resulted in smooth run and walking cycles, which I hadn’t previously completed before in my Animation course.
With these animated cycles, I had a lot of help from walking and running references to take inspiration from. A lot of these were youtube video reference of the human body’s basic movements, but an example of a reference image used is pasted below.
Another thing that helped enormously long my animations was a book I have purchased called, “the illusion of life”. This has been a very helpful for me to learn and understand the basic principles of movement in animation and bringing things to life.
This book is written by “Frank Thomas” and “Ollie Johnston” and is about the methods used by Disney Animation, both in their early days of animation and their modern works too.
The third and final animation completed for this assignment is my Body Mechanics animation. this was slightly more difficult as it was using poses I have never had to position a character into before. For reference i used a video such as this one linked below to help me blockout the poses throughout the animation.
The above video gave me the basic positions to start my animation.
The video I have linked below is the main reference I used for adding the spin to my characters throw.
This video was very useful as it shows you the exact separate poses. The only reason this was difficult in my animation process is because I added the spin after I had completed a full shot-put throw. Therefore my character ended up spinning on the spot. If I was to re-do this animation in the near future, I would make the steps taken while spinning more clear and appear to move the character forward for a longer distance throw.
Overall, I enjoyed this assignment very much, as 3D character animation is one of the desirable job roles for me in my future career in Animation. Each Animation taught me different things about the principles of animations and reminded me of the best route to take, from first laying out the poses to an animation, to making the animation loop smoothly. I look forward to any animation projects to do with character animation and body mechanics in the future and can maybe incorporate my own rig into a character animation very soon.