For this week we were looking into the body mechanics of a run and jump and how to really sell force and weight in mid-air. The first task was to do a 3d jump of which we blocked out but, the challenge was to get a flowing movement through the arcs of the jump. I did this by using the root control to move the rig up and add some distance to the animation. The next step was taking the stiffness out of the model which as easy enough to do by adding rotation to the spine and along with some overshoot of the on the landing pose add some much-needed weight to the piece. To get some external advice I looked at how other people animated there jumps where a site called caveacadmy. Here they went through each pose with a few more tips for creatine key poses such as the landing where they state to “Really take the impact and push the spine into a strong c-shape to once more contrast with the previous stretched pose and its straight spine.” This told me that on each of the lunch pose and landing pose had to be more compress to sell the force of the jump upwards and equal to sell the force of the landing.
Then it was a matter of speed of when to go fast and slow along with getting some weight into the hips of the jump. For the speed I looked at the frames at the start and finish and moved them closer together to speed them up by a fraction and extended the peak of the jump to have some ease in and out during the jump. The graph editor was useful for this with the Bezier curves providing allot of aid during this stage. Then after doing a few jumps myself and getting some more references form YouTube I noticed that at the start of the jump the hips are more behind the model which creates this spring shape which gets shortly released which gives the cycle a good sense of weight.
Run Progress
I decide this week that I was going to move forward with my 3D run cycle after finding that I was progressing with the 3d software faster than toon boom as I still only new to that software. The good thing though from last week I already had a block in place for my run so knew it was only a matter adding the overlap and getting the arms right. The things I found hard were the cloths and the hair which was challenging enough for my sneak walk. I knew this because I wanted to incorporate speed into the cycle so I knew the hair would not fall as much as it normally would so I would be a bit straighter so I looked at the scarf for my 2d walk as that had the same sort of effect I was looking for in a walk. This would intern create a sense of speed within the walk and really sell the motion of the run. On the other hand, I was given some advice from the tutors to add mor of a bend to the spine of the body so it would have this nice up and down motion as the run was more of a determined sprint rather than a sprit in general. This meant I had to add more weight to each step to get that force behind the run. Though I am going to go back and re do the arms as they just come that bit too high and extend to far, I think I did this because I was trying to add some drag to the arms but I think it is backfired to a degree. now i just waiting for some more feedback.
leap of faith
Then it was time to start the run and jump where I stared off by blocking out the cycle with the based key poses Richard Williams has in his re-fences. During this stage I wanted to try and exaggerate some poses like the way down I wanted to do a road runner like panic pose where the arm flail about. To do this I attempted to use some smear frames to sell this effect. This intern informed what kind of run I wanted to do was a test flight so, this means that I could do wings for some secondary action. To get an idea of how to do the jump section of the cycle along with the 3d block I did eailer today i did a thumbnail of the airtime poses. This combined with the 3d block I could really see how to animate each frame and know what each key frame should be.
Then after getting some feedback, I was told to add more key frames to make it more fluid in the process. This also allowed me to add some extra frames to hold on the lunch pose where I was able to hold that frame a second longer to create the same effect as this morning’s jump and hold more in the air and landing to further show weight in the cycle.
Now that I’m in the polishing phase of the project i took the time to implement some of the tutor’s feedback. For the run and jump the feedback was more focused on the key frames and some missing key poeses such as a down pose and a passing pose of which was a bit of an easy fix it was really just a matter of putting the key frames there while also keeping in mind the volume of each drawing I did. The second part of the feedback was to do with adding an extra step on the other side once the character had landed but this proved tricky to implement. The idea was to have him spring off frame which in my opinion added more weight to the cycle as a whole but i did give it an attempt but doe to the spacing any attempts at this made the flow of the run feel a bit Janky and disrupted the flow as a whole. Though this didn’t work out as plan I’m still pleased with how it turned out with the wight being good on tack off and landing and each down pose caring that weight as well.
The run was also coming along well, and feedback was mostly positive for some very minor element such as the ponytail along with some extreme poses. The extreme poses were a bit of a judgment call dew to them being a part of my reference but, i was happy with them as they are it can be a little jittery if you play it on windows play back but somehow fine everywhere else. For the ponytail it was just moving up and down too fast so i used the graph editor to slow them down with each control in the chain moving slower in the process to create a more natural movement overall. This I think improves the run by a lot and gives it this sense of being grounded to a degree. Though I do think I could ease off the rotation of the upper body just a little bit, so it doesn’t look like her whole spine is affected by each up pose.
To finish off the advice for the sneak walk the tutor noticed that one of the arms was coming down way too fast and was just slightly out of sync with the rest of the body. This does sound easy enough to fix but I couldn’t find which control was causing the issues which was frustrating. Though I found that the issue was related to how the body comes down so to sort of fix this I adjusted the graph editor on the chest and hips to try and elevate this to a degree which worked and re posed the arm to have more of a drag when coming down.
jahorul amin (28 april 2010) 06. how to animate a jump (online) https://caveacademy.com/wiki/post-production-shots/animation/animation-training/introduction-to-animation-course/how-to-animate-a-jump/
Kathy Tan ( 19 aug 2018 ) Jump reference (online) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxlyXmNJ9Hs
mome2600 (30 jun 2019) animation reference – jump3 (online) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoDZmyO59SM