I continued working on my animation, I obviously struggled with making it look organic and not robotic or floaty. Stepping back helped a lot, and getting feedback from friends and family who pointed out when something looked off was a huge help, especially when getting feedback from lecturers wasn’t available. I didn’t struggle too much with the weightlift, except for blending the IK and FK switching, it was more of a matter of time and patience and separating the task between several days to allow myself to see the mistakes with fresh eyes the next day.

Here is my animation before the changes I made after getting my final feedback:

• I needed to fix the hands to avoid having it go through the carrot leaves too much and because they were going inside one another.
• The lecturer also suggested I stretch the carrot down a little so it wouldn’t look like it was already out of the dirt.

Which led me to realize the cartoon look  I was going for : the carrot being pulled out of the dirt with a comical pause mid-air and finally the fall, didn’t translate well. I instead took the lecturers feedback of making the carrot longer but made it work in my cartoon ideas favour. I stretched the carrot so it would look like it was stretching out if the ground and then bounce out which causes her to fall back. It makes her big fall back logical as opposed to how the animation was before.

Block out and Rough animation:

I noticed that throughout the animation process with the feedback I received my animation changed for the better specially when I initially didn’t have the arms of the model breaking at all, those small stretches to her limbs sold the struggle of pulling such a big carrot out of the ground, similarly to the references I showed previously.

Here are some notes I took while adjusting my block out after some feedback:

 

Such as the balance of the characters weight, my lecturer suggested to make sure I had a balanced amount of weight to the centre line. So I looked through each key poses I did and if I felt she was off balance to the centre line I took some notes to adjust it later.

After that initial block out, I added more frames and details, which is where I also filmed myself to get the poses right. Though throughout the animating process I did changes like instead of having her prop the carrot on her shoulder, with the suggestion of my lecturer I made her fall back and have the carrot fly back.

I didn’t shy away from getting feedback because an outside opinion is always helpful in making the animation better, here is some of the feedback I got from my lecturers and the changes I planned to do:

Other than that my block out and in-betweens were relatively simple to work on it was mostly a lot of adjusting and playing around to figure out what looked best.

(+) class exercise:

For both my animations in general the chair exercises helped me warm up and a quick reminder for the FK and IK switching which I took advantage of for both animations in this assignment.

References and block out sketch:

Warm up:

I started of my research with looking at weightlifting competitions specially the ones where they use boulders. Although I didn’t end up doing it that style of weightlifting due to it being too simple and straightforward for what the lecturers were asking of us to do, it did help me with understanding the basics of weightlifting, and how to go about blocking out the rain character pulling a carrot out of the dirt, which is what I ended up going for after some feedback from my lecturers.

I focused mainly on one of the many references I found and took these notes on sync sketch to study the animation which still helped me when making my final animation.

These are some videos that helped me while researching, this animation, to better understand in different angles how they lifted the boulder. Which still was a helpful analysis to have in mind while working on the carrot pulling animation:

• https://youtu.be/8spgvele6LQ?si=jZ0AUdVX5UcbM_T3
• https://youtu.be/rEZfpYa42sg?si=45RpCI6MdjCwqgLI
• https://youtu.be/o19Qshz8jLE?si=Az8UrtnR_TqLaw6N
• https://youtu.be/t32c0GLRvU4?si=vRjaF5wmLnedsnaO

A reference I also used from our previous animations was the run and jump guide from Richard Williams, because many of the key poses I saw on the weightlifting videos reminded me of these key poses:

Eventually I made the block out on paper, using the analysis I did on Syncsketch as a guide:

Carrot pulling animation:

Other then starting off with what I had found previously I need more animation specific to the movements I wanted to achieve in the block out I had done to plan out what I wanted to go for:

I used this for the arches of the back and the fall back.

 

this was a good reference for the struggle on pulling something heavy off the ground, and create an breaking the arms and the arching of the back in action in 3D.

 

The block out I had done previously was a good for starting point for the carrot pulling animation I also ended up blocking out on paper as well.

I also used the idea of the squash and stretch we did in the run and jump animation here as well when the character was pulling on the carrot, to exaggerate the action and emphasise on how hard it is to pull it out of the ground, make it obvious she is struggling and it’s not something easy to pull out of the ground.

In cases where the internet wouldn’t offer all the references I needed, I filmed myself to see how I would naturally go about doing what my character is doing, to achieve a somewhat realistic look. And I really needed a reference for a specific pose:

Because I was having a hard time understanding how she would pull her body back and how her back would bend and her legs would be.