Assignment 2 – Emotion
References:
The second part of the animation assignment we were asked to use either the Monty or Ultimate walker rig in order convey some sort of emotion. For my animation I knew off the bat the I wanted to try and animate my character either being shocked or scared and after some thought I decided to have a ball fall from the sky in front of the character, then have the main character jump back. So like the first part I went and tried to do some research before actually animating, however unlike animating a run cycle trying to find references for someone or something being shocked isn’t nearly as easy. In the beginning I did find a couple of 3D animations with characters doing scared expressions however most of them were full body rigs, meanwhile I was working with a ball and two legs. Since I couldn’t find anything online I went and made my own visual references using a recording of myself in order to help set out key movements and figure out how the different parts of the body would move when doing that sort of motion.
Using these references really helped me convey the type of emotion I was out to achieve when I went out to begin animating, although it isn’t quite the same movement I took different parts from each in order to inform and push my creative process into making the final outcome.
(I would like to add that I tried to add the reference video I took myself, however the site wouldn’t playback the video.)
Blocking:
When first blocking out my movement I had my character see the ball, do a quick squat down then they’d hop back on one foot, followed by them learning forward to inspect the ball, however instead decided to cut out the part at the end where the character leans forward in order to focus on the character actually being scared.
Timing:
As for the timing I wanted the movement to be fairly quick at the beginning where the character would shoot up immediately after the ball falls in front of them, have them then ease in the air a moment after which they’d then ease out into a drop with a bit of an overshoot to help sell the weight of the landing, followed by the character then slowly easing into the final pose with the characters leg up high away from the ball.
I did have a little trouble in the beginning while I was working on the timing, specifically when the character was landing after they fell, the character would drift to the side and character’s easing at the end was very non-organic. After a little while I realised that the character shouldn’t be moving nearly as much right before landing and to fix the issue with the leg I simply an in-between between the second last and last pose to help speed up the ease out and slow down the ease in, in turn making the movement feel much more organic and fluid.
Polish:
As for the polish I added some squash and stretch to the ball as it bent down and shot up, it’s very subtle due to the fact that I didn’t want to overdo the effect, however I felt like it was just enough in order to sell the characters motion even further, in addition to that I added some of the toe roll in order to the movement of his feet much more fluid as his feet moved in the air. I had also had the characters “head” twist to face towards the ball, I initially thought to have the ball act like hips however having the ball face down towards the ball gives it a bit more character at the sacrifice of some anatomically correct movement. In addition to this I also went into the graph editor in order to get rid of any unnecessary keyframes to help give the character a much more fluid motion.
Final:
Overall I’m really happy with the outcome, I feel like it convey the expression adequately and the motion is fluid without any jitters or blemishes. If I had more time I’d definitely go back and add the motion I cut out at the beginning to add on further to the characters expressions overall though I’m more than happy with where it ended up.
Render:
Like the last animation I also did a render using Arnold and Arnolds skydome light with a plane expanded out to act like a floor, in order to achieve the same look as the previous render.
