While the majority of my tutor feedback is included in the relevant posts, I felt it important to also reflect here on some of the recurring issues I’d encountered during this first assessment task.
My biggest takeaway was, unless purposely doing ‘stretchy’ animation, to not overextend or overstretch the limbs as this makes the animation look unnatural and causes the rig geometry to ‘pop.’
My knee popping issue
Looking back, knee pop issues had occurred in a few of my initial animations, but now thanks to the feedback I received, I’ve an understanding of how this can be easily rectified in the graph editor by simply adjusting down the height of the hips on the Y-axis in the relevant pose, softening the knee by pulling it back slightly so that when the foot lifts it continues to travel a little in the Z location, or unnatural straightness rectified by pulling the knee down slightly at its highest point.
At the start of the module, as a beginner attempting to create fluidity of movement and give my animations additional appeal, I’d often used more keyframes and in-betweens than required, and so following feedback, had needed to smooth my cycles by removing any unnecessary frames. This caused issues with my vanilla walk cycle, in that I’d unknowingly deleted both the down and passing position keyframes instead of ones located beside them, and having overwritten my file, I had to restart the animation again. However having now gained more experience, I’m happy to rely solely on the essential keyframes, and to make any necessary adjustments in the graph editor using either linear translation or Bezier curves as required.
Graph Editor Information
It also hadn’t occurred to me how Blender automatically setting the opening frame to ‘1’ was making it much more difficult for me to calculate my mid-point etc., and so Rachel’s tip to make my calculations easier by changing the opening frame to ‘0’ might have only been a little piece of advice, but it will be of huge help in the future.