Starting off my movement animation, I knew straight away I wanted to do an animation of parkour. I went through a lot of YouTube videos and channels deciding what kind of jumps or flips I could achieve.
I began by animating a basic jump which would flow into a second with a landing pose. I used a reference from Pinterest that showed me basic blocking to start me off.
From these keyframes I went back into them and added more spacing between the legs, slighting lifting one leg higher than the other in a mid jump and adjusting the arms outwards. I also added squash and stretch in the middle of the jump and adjusted the length of time my character would be while at the highest part of the jump.
One issue I did come across was that in-between frames the arms would go out of place. To fix this issue I found out about Gimbal locking, this meant I had to go into the roation tool into Gimbal mode and rotate the axis. Then when returning to my normal axis I was able to adjust and set a new key.
From this landing pose I was able to review these frames. I adjusted the width of the feet apart and lowered the body down. This then allowed me to add in a shuffle animation to make it seem that the rig had fallen but continued momentum into the next jump. However, when trying to animate this shuffle it ended up looking like the feet were gliding across the ground and so instead I decided to do and longer landing and animate the rig straight into the run.
After completing the run I started the final part of my animation which was the front flip. This last jump began as a thought of doing a b-flip but looking through step by step screenshots of the frames I thought I would be over doing the overall animation. I found a great reference of a flip which I followed some but not all of them. It took me a while to adjust the distance in which the rig would jump but the overall ending seemed realistic in terms of the distance the rig ran before the jump.
One of my biggest struggles while animating was using the dope sheet. I struggled when it came to adjusting the frames, sometimes the body would move but the positioning of the feet would be left but I discovered to select the whole body and move the frame after. From this every keyframe I adjusted the frames moved correctly.
The two images below show me struggling with the dope sheet and some things moving and others not but I simply deleted the frames and selected the whole rig before moving the frame.
To render this animation I repeated the same as my other cycles using Arnold at the same quality and imported the images to premier pro. This time I didn’t repeat the video clip I just kept it as one due to the duration of this animation compared to the other two.
Below is my final video: