This is my Blog post for the run and jump, the weight lift and the lip sync, I really enjoyed working on all of these pieces and discovered a lot of new ways to help my work flow work smoother and more seamless in the future, I ran in to some complications whilst working on these project but found some interesting techniques to get past them so that I could continue to animate. It was fun to play around with different weights and speeds and try to find the one that has a good balance for the piece.

The run and jump was trickier than I imagined, especially when getting the movement of the ground to match the pace of the feet, although I believe that the hardest part was reducing the slide of the feet on the ground and keeping them from clipping through the floor whilst taking off and landing I found quite a simple wok around for this which was parent the camera and the lights to the ground and move the ground to keep his feet above the level, this mixed with the shakily add-on for the camera, really didn’t cause any unwanted effect, going back to the shakify add-on, I wanted to make it almost look like someone was actually recording him, instead of having a solid moving camera as it did not match the overall aesthetic for this piece of work, I believe that this pulled the scene together and gave it more of a finished look. The actual overall animation wasn’t too tricky especially whenever using the blocking jump reference give to us by Aodhan, which was also easy to follow along and quite enjoyable trying to tweak everything to get it looking right. The lighting was a simple 3 point lighting system using the ‘3 point lighting’ add-on in blender.  When I was making the gap that I wanted him to jump over, I kept it as a plane and moved it along the ground to make it look as though he was approaching a hole, but this came with its own series of problems one of which was the fact that It looked like a black void and gave off no real sense of depth so to combat this I realised that if I added another plane and gave it a darker colour then I could give off the effect of a 3d gap, the only problem with this is that the camera had a changing view of the gap over the course of about 5 seconds, so I then realised that I could just add shape keys to the ‘depth planes’ and change them over time to look like the angles were correct for the camera, I actually really loved this idea and so I started to work on it to get it looking right, I set the different shape keys so that I could key frame the change depending on the camera, this worked wonders and made the gap look realistically 3d and not just look like  two planes layered one atop the other, another issue that I ran in to whilst doing this was the  fact that at the start whilst we were moving up to the gap then there would be a stage in which the view would not be great enough to see over the edge and see the other side of it, therefore I decided to key frame the visibility of the plane so that it looked like it appeared whilst the camera went over the gap just like how it would in real life, I really believe that this turned out great and I am happy with the outcome of the overall piece.

I think that the lip sync was my favourite one out of the three of them to do, there’s something satisfying about getting the audio and the lips to match, the audio sequence that I chose was from a TV show called ‘parks and recreation’ I believe that the sound that I chose was a good candidate as it would let me add different facial expressions to convey different emotions and not just one, there was anger, confusion and almost a hint of sadness throughout this bit, so I decided to run with it and see how it would go, working with audio can be kind of tricky and tedious but once you feel like you’ve got it, it all fits together well. For the beginning body pose, I chose more of a stern look, with the hands placed on the hips to convey a serious tone and I dipped the eyebrows also to enhance the effect. I focused a lot on the eyebrows as that is the main tell in someone’s intent and expression, for instance I made the rig raise one eyebrow when I wanted to convey a sense of confusion, or even nearer the end I raised both eyebrows to try and portray a feeling of helplessness that her point wasn’t getting across or to convey disbelief, I believe that it could be seen both ways. Her hands were also a good way for me to get across her emotions, I only moved them when I thought that the part was getting really serious and make it give the feeling that she really wanted to be heard out. I also made her tap her foot near the start to show restlessness and annoyance although this is not shown in the final render as I was having complications with getting it to render within a different framing. Working on the head was quite fun as it came with some secondary animation with the hair, so for the pony tail I did the pendulum method to convey a sense of weight being thrown around and in the hair curl at the front I made it kind of spring up and down depending on the movements of the head.

For the weight lifting things were a bit different, in the sense that there didn’t need to be a whole lot of movement, but whatever movement that there was, had to be effected by strenuous weight, I would be lying if I said that this wasn’t a difficult animation to do. Originally I wanted him to lift an anvil off of the ground,  had everything set up for this and it was working but I ran in to a lot of different complications with clipping and weird movement when trying to use the dynamic parent add-on with both hands on one object, but to be fair this made sense that it didn’t work, so instead I decided to scrap the idea and go for something that would let me parent two separate objects to the two separate hands, the fingers were also quite easy to get right as I just pulled them closer to the bar until I saw them start to clip and moved it up a little bit, this let me portray the sense that the model was actually wrapping his hands around the bars, it was difficult at times working in the local axis though, but it was easy to manage once I got used to it. so instead of the anvil I decided to model dumbbells and dumbbell racks, and have him lift those instead, this seemed to work great and it also allowed me to slow down one of the arms almost as if he didn’t have as much power in that arm, this also then led me to delaying the coming up of the shoulders and added to the effect of struggle. Whilst modelling the dumbbell I wanted to keep it simple as that was not the main feature of this animation so Its pretty much made up of five cylinders and two gears and then I just subdivided them and parented the cogs on to the weigh as I didn’t want the cogs to get subdivided, but I knew that I wanted to add an actual background to this piece all whilst still keeping it kind of a simple area, so I duplicated the dumbbells and removed the parents, joined them together and added an array modifier on them to create two rows of dumbbells going in different directions, I also added a dead lift mat just to break up the symmetry of the background.

Overall I really enjoyed working on these projects and learnt a lot from the classes and different videos that helped to explain things to me on a different level, I believe that working on these will definitely have an impact on my future projects and on my overall work flow. The blocking out of each animation really helped me to get the movements down right and keep them smooth and working coherently, it also allowed me to imagine new ways in which that I should move the character to give a better sense of weight or attitude although I did not like the blocking out that I did for the weight lifting piece as it didn’t seem to fit, so I redone it when I changed over to the dumbbells and it seemed to work great. If I were to go back and change anything it would probably have to be adding a bit more animation after the weight lift as I kind of just stuck with the end of the blocking and I believe that if there was more on to the end of the weight lift then this would have been a nicer and smoother looking piece.

Research:

During my research it was very interesting and informative to see how many different gates people have whilst walking/running, but this ultimately made it easier as you don’t have to match them with pinpoint accuracy, I used mainly videos for my references but also a couple of side profile photos to help me with keeping my key frames simple and accurate. As I was researching, most people recommended that others should use the Richard Williams key frame reference from ‘the animators survival kit‘, which is actually very helpful as noted before. Finding the Conor McGregor walk was also quite easy as Vince McMahon made the walk quite famous, and there are countless videos of Vince and McGregor that I could find online showcasing said walk. Likewise the running references were quite easy to find and utilise. For the plane run I decided to look at children’s youtubers as they seemed to more prevalent, this lead me to Blippi, the clip that I used was quite short but it didn’t matter, it was what I was looking for and I believe that it ultimately turned out well. Also the clip that I used for the standard run was a good reference but I decided to tweak it a bit so it looks as though my character is running at a faster pace I also believe that this turned out really well. I lastly decided to search for add-ons to make my cycles look better and I found one called auto-smear which ultimately just smears your 3D movements and it gave a great accent to some of the cycles so I decided to showcase the plain version and the versions with the smears, It was tough getting used to this addon as sometimes it wouldn’t render the way that it showed in the preview, but the more I tweaked it the closer I could get it to look like what I wanted it to, I noticed that there were very little trails behind the character and to get the running look, then I had to move the whole model, background, lights and camera so that everything in the scene was moving in one direction but the background and lighting stayed the same, this created an amazing effect but it gave a slovenly render, with more tweaking I believe that I could get it to look better but as my not smeared cycles looked a lot better then I just left it and will play with it in my own time. I however was confused by the lack of professionally done reference video although there more than likely are very good paid ones. All in all I enjoyed the research but also believe that i should have looked at more references before making my walks even though i don’t think it would have changed my walks, so I am going to do more research in my own time and keep reproducing different walk and run cycles, I also really want to learn how to make a professional rig with a lot of different controllers and restraints so that’s next on my list.

Reflection:

Before the feedback class, I thought that I had some problems with the way that my standard walk cycle was working, but I was told that it looked quite good so I believe that I was just working on it for so long that it looked strange, getting the second opinion on it made me feel a lot more confident in my work, on the other hand my funky walk cycle was quite off the mark as I didn’t originally use a reference for it, so I decided to change it about and make it look lot more like the Conor McGregor walk (billionaire walk). But I still think that something is off with it, but hopefully it’s the same situation as before and I was just looking at it for too long. I really like both of my run cycles, we were told in a previous class that run cycles are easier than walk cycles and that is very correct, I really enjoyed tweaking things about to make the run cycles seamless and true to it’s form. For the funky run cycle I decided to go for a childlike aeroplane run, and the references were really helpful for this one in particular as it allowed me to get the right bend in the back and the correct arches Overall I loved this piece of work as it let’s me create more realistic and natural walk/run cycles.  I enjoyed the challenge this task especially because beforehand I didn’t know a lot about the movements and placement of different rigs, it also showed me how many controllers that a professional rig would need just to make it operate correctly. This semester so far has been quite fun and challenging even though I had a few bumps along the road I don’t think that it has hindered my final result. For the lighting I used a standard 3 point lighting and then added in a light that had minus figures creating a dark void-like room, although there were two awkward things about this set up one of which was the shadow caustics, it created white shadows on the ground so to get over this I just turned off shadows and it kept the darkness which was nice, the other was the fact that it started to combat my previous 3 point light setup, so I decided to boost the lights values so it would equal itself out I think that this worked quite well. I chose against doing the 2D as I am a lot more efficient and polished in 3D even though I do want to get proficient in 2D in the near future, my 2D is just not up to par hence why I didn’t use it.

Blender Market. (n.d.). Autosmear. [online] Available at: https://blendermarket.com/products/autosmear.

‌www.youtube.com. (n.d.). Blippi Explores Planes For Kids | Vehicles For Children | Educational Videos For Kids. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7U6LiYHpnY&t=575s.

‌^ 9:30 – 10:00 ^

www.youtube.com. (n.d.). Why does Conor McGregor walk so funny? [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yILPIG4HBFY.

www.youtube.com. (n.d.). Running in side view- Animation Reference Videos. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDc36-99nY4.

‌Williams, R. (2001). The animator’s survival kit. London: Faber And Faber.