week – 7 weight lifting – Alexander Massey BDES Animation blog

For this week we started the next project for body machines where we looked at how the body moves during a weightlift. The idea is to try and convey a more realistic since of weight within this animation so, when we view it, we can see the struggle of the character and in theprocess tricking us into believing that the 2D weights havesome weight to them.for this I looked at some tips for this subject where Ifound a post by the animationmentor where it states that “Weight is described through the visual presentation of opposing forces” so the struggle mush be meant by and equal forces which create the weight effect we will see on screen. For our first task, we were told to animate a basic weight lift from a reference which will help us goforward when it comes to creating our own unique animation.

The task was easy with just gettingsome key frames into the animation along with the anticipation. The harder past for me was getting the perspective on the weights right as well as the overall struggle of holdingthe weights when the character came to its peak. For the perspectiveIdecided to track the path of the weight in the animatation to see if they needed to come closer near the peak or if they would say the same, which intern would help me work out the perspective of the animation. This did help as Inoticed the weight would come closer to the body as the animation progressed,so I adjusted the weight farther back to help sell the perspective of the animation.

I fixed the struggle but, not by a lot, it just comes down way too fast overallwhichmeans that I just need to add a few more key frames to sell this effect. This worked for the most part. I think if I were to come back to this,I would end up changing the holding poses to 3s instead of the 2 with some shakes sprinkled in-between to really push this idea but, for now I am pleased with how it all turned out.

For 3D today we were given a little crash course of how to properly add in anticipation through the graph editor and how to use it to help with our blocking out of the task we were given. The idea was to follow the instructions on the side of the tool bar and add the keyframes needed to create the anticipation of the characters. This was really adding a frame of the character leaning ever so slightly further than the first poses, so it builds momentum and communicates to us what they are about to do. For the graph editor we turn it to constants so when we played the animation it would not tween but jump to each frame like its 2D and through this process we were able to identify more obvious problems with the animation before switching to Bezier.

For the homework for this week, we had to create an idea of what we wanted to do for our weight lift and gather the right reference for our lifts. I had 2 ideas for my animations with one being a sword in the but instead of being worthy the character ends up being too strong and taking the sword and the stone with them. This is a good base that I could build off due to there being a good opportunity to add weight to the initial lift and the weight of the stone falling onto them. I do think if I were to have them hold it over their head and have it wobble a bit it could sell this idea better, but that does sound that it would take up a bit of time to do right and require some advanced body mechanics for me with the legs.

For the second idea, I thought of an archer trying to pull an arrow out of a target to only fly backward because as an archer myself, this can be hard to do if you do not have a good grip on the arrow. This sounds like a clever idea, and if I could get the right perspective for the host, which would contain the right keyframes to sell this effect well. I do need to keep this in mind though if I’m to have a unique angle I do need to ensure that the key poses can be read and communicated properly because after I filmed my reference for this I did notice that it was hard to see some of the movements. Though it was untimely a backup idea, I am overall pleading with some of my initial sketches I did and how I could really push this idea further going forward.