Assignment 2: Animation

Walk Cycle

Last Christmas and over the summer I experimented with animating some walk cycles in 2D, using blocking on the app procreate as well as rotoscoping with a ‘straight-ahead’ approach;

 

From these exercises, I learned that there is more to animating a walk cycle than simply moving the limbs of the character back and forward, a major importance also lies on creating the impression that the weight of the character’s body is distributed in such away that it affects how they move. In order to study this further using the theory I’ve been learning in class, I created a video reference from which I chose my key poses;

In comparing these frames to the graph showing the stages of the walk cycle by Richard Williams taken from ‘The Animator’s Survival Kit’, I noticed that in my reference video, there isn’t a lot of ‘personality’ in the way I walk, by which I mean that it is fairly basic as this is my natural walk; no swinging strides, which is what I wanted to explore in my finished animation. I instead used a combination of the reference from ‘The Animator’s Survival Kit’, my own video reference, and my knowledge on the theory of conveying the appearance of confidence in a character.

As I had already used 2D animation previously, I wanted to use the 3D jack rig for this assignment so I could further explore how the distribution of a characters weight affects the rest of the pose to make it more life-like. I felt that the key frames from my references really helped me in terms of blocking the animation, as I found the pose-to-pose approach allowed me to get a better sense of how and when my character would arrive at a certain point before I added in-betweens on the timeline.

I felt I achieved good posing on the ‘up’, ‘passing’ and ‘contact’ frames. The arms overlapped at the pace I wanted them to and upon reaching their highest position the elbow bends to connote a marching stride. I kept the head tilted upwards as well to further the sense of confidence that the ‘character’ has. One thing that I have noticed upon reflection is that I may have made my ‘down’ pose a little too exaggerated, as it almost seems as though my rig is going to stoop down to one knee (second image) which makes the overall walk cycle seem somewhat rigid. I feel I was able to convey good movement through the hips and spine as well but if I were to do this again, I would possibly take more time to make small changes on the in-between frames to end up with a smoother finished cycle.

 

Run Cycle

Unlike the walk cycle, the run cycle differs in that rather than a sense of one foot being on the ground at any one time, there is a point where neither foot touches the ground, as I’ve observed in this diagram from ‘The Animator’s Survival Kit’;

I wanted to come up with a reason for why my model would be running in order to help me visualise how I might add character and personality to the rig. Usually when I’m running it’s because I’m about to miss my bus, so I used that as my prompt and created a rough reference page. I also took some inspiration from the scene in The Polar Express (2004) where the boy chases after his friend to return her ticket, and from this I decided it may be good to add the outstretched arm to my run cycle, however, since my model isn’t running against blistering wind such as the character from The Polar Express is, I decided that its other arm would be swinging loosely as it’s other arm would be rigid;

From my references and my own desired outcome, I again began to block out the key frames of my run cycle using a pose-to-pose approach;

I think that having one of the arms raised up really helped with the posing as it provided an indicator of the flow of motion and helped me to assess when the character should be leaning forward slightly, and how the movement of the hips and spine translate to the raised shoulder(s). Aside from the posing, we learned through the movement constraint exercises we did in our lectures that even if a character is standing perfectly still, nothing stays stationary; there will always be a subtle movement in the neck or chest and so on. By this logic, I understood that even though I had identified and keyed my main poses, there were other small alterations I needed to make with the in-between frames, such as minuscule turns of the wrist on the raised arm to show the loose hand movement, as well as a subtle rotation of the first arm constraint to show the arm swaying in and out from the model rather than just staying in the one position. I animated this rig on 4s which, after viewing the finished cycle, I can conclude that this created more of a slow-motion effect, which did make the cycle seem more dramatic which I suppose helped to convey emotion or personality in the animation, but I think if I were to do this again, I’d use less space in the timeline between each frame, and for alterations such as this, I’d like to be more proficient at using the graph editor.

 

Body Constraint Rig; Squat

For the Body Constraint exercise, I decided to animated a person slowly lowering themselves into a squatting position. This all came to fruition after considering the possibility of using straight-ahead animation for this rig instead of pose-to-pose blocking as I had done for the previous two cycles. After reviewing Disney’s ‘The 12 Principles of Animation’, it seemed that this animation method was the way to go, as I was feeling more experimental, and the straight-ahead process would allow for more fluidity in the finished animation. After trying out different poses on the rig, I made a video for reference as well as a rough animatic;

After reviewing my references, I decided I wanted to make the squat deeper in that the model almost sits down towards the end of the animation, and I kept this in mind as I began the straight-ahead approach. I felt that it was freeing to animate without using keyframes because not only did it allow me to work without a guide, improving my confidence, but it also allowed me to experiment more than I originally would have with a 3D rig. I was able to set keys for each body constraint individually for each movement to come together to create a final animation. The key features I was mindful of throughout the process were the hips and spine in addition to the legs. As the squat progresses, there is a certain point where the spine stops arching outward and starts to curve inward as the waist moves outward. I added this motion closer to the lower back so as not to alter the torso. I intended to keep the feet steady but as I went along I did animate a slight spreading of the feet as the squat progressed. In retrospect, I think it would have been better for my starting pose to have spread the feet slightly wider to illustrate the bend of the knees going outward later in the animation. I also added small subtle movements to the arms, neck and head, because (as I found when creating the reference video) it is incredibly difficult to stay completely still during a squat, so in light of this, I had to add a small waver in the outstretched arms. I’m quite happy with how it turned out although if I were to do this again I might try different variations on this animation, such as quick repetitive squats or maybe a squat and jump to see what other body constraints I observe from further research.

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