—Concepts & References—
At the start of this project I brainstormed some ideas for the body mechanics animation. I considered a dance routine or an attack with a weapon but in the end I settled for a fight between two characters. I wanted to make more of a sneaking type of walk for the walk cycle and a bouncy sort of run.
—Fight—
Ogawa Ryu TessenJutsu – Nihon Me to Sanbon Me – YouTube
Iron Fan Self Defense-HD – YouTube
—Walk—
—Run—
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—Body Mechanics Animation—
After brainstorming what I wanted to do for the set of animations I storyboarded the body mechanics animation as I knew that it would be the most complicated.
Next I turned the storyboards into an animatic to ensure that the motion came across clearly and that I could get a rough timing for the animation.
Then I moved onto the rough pass of the animation, focusing on the purple character first so that I could get their individual movements right then onto the cyan one, working backwards from the point of contact that their weapons make so that the timing will be somewhat right.
After receiving feedback from Alec, I adjusted the animations where needed, put both characters together and made some more tweaks to the timing.
The next step was working on the secondary animation for both characters. I chose to break this down into three sections so that I could focus on one part at a time and not get overly confused when animating.
After the secondary motion, I moved onto cleaning up and creating the lineart of the final animation ready for adding colour.
I like how the animation turned out and I feel the movements are clear but I wish I held the impact of the weapons longer to give it more impact.
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—Walk Cycle Animation—
For the walk cycle I relied heavily on references to get the movement and speed right.
I created a first pass of rough animation to get the key poses right and the main movement; it was a bit jittery and the arm appeared to dislocate from the shoulder so I made a second pass to refine the movement a bit and adjust the timing of the animation.
Like the body mechanic animation, I focused on each part of the character individually to make it easier on myself. I first added the hair and adjusted the movement of the arm a bit so that it wasn’t as still, then the clothing and finally the face.
After, I cleaned up the animation and added lineart and colour.
I feel I captured the movement from the references quite well but looking back the arm is still a bit still and the blinking is quite rhythmic but I just copy and pasted the full cycle to make him walk across the screen so I don’t mind too much.
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—Run Cycle Animation—
When creating the run cycle I started with an ordinary run but then decided to make him hold his clothes out of the way.
With the first pass I blocked out the key poses and with the second I I adjusted the timing and fixed the legs a bit. For the last pass I adjusted the arms so that they were in a more upright position for holding up his clothing.
After the rough passes I moved onto the secondary animation including the hair, the clothes and the face.
Next I focused on creating the lineart and adding colours.
I struggled with the motion of the hair a bit but I think it turned out okay, it maybe snakes a bit too much but I like the overall bounciness of the run.
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