For this assignment, we were required to create two short animations of a character – one that shows body mechanics, and another that conveys personality and emotion. Originally, I chose to animate a backflip and a pirouette as I thought a backflip would be challenging, and that dancing can show elegance. But after this, I wasn’t sure if it would be read as such, and the backflip wasn’t turning out exactly like I wanted to. So I change the pirouette to be the full body animation, and walking backwards to be the emotion one.
For the backflip, I looked at the high jump event from the Olympics, as well as the Dragoon and Red Mage Classes from Final Fantasy XIV. I didn’t really plan it out and went off reference images to get the type of movement I wanted.
The pirouette was more simple and I looked at figure skaters and Vora from Paladins. The only problem I had was making the rig look like it didn’t break all of its limbs as it moved. At times, the foot would bend painfully unnaturally, but I was able to get it under control eventually. Until I tried the curtsey, and then it’s knees broke. I elected to not have it bend down too lowly and that seemed to fix the issue.
I didn’t exactly plan the scary animation – I stood up, took a couple of step backwards in my room and then hit the random box I had laying around. I added the crouching bit later and every time I needed to remember how I looked for the animation, I walked backwards again. One thing I found difficult was that showing emotion without arms was somewhat difficult – I would have loved to have the arms come up to the chest to protect itself.
First, I attempted to complete the backflip animation. And I was quite proud, until I tried tuning it and it ended up worse. I decided to keep it, even though the flip itself was way too slow and I think that may have been an issue with the keyframes. I think I added way too many.
I moved onto animating the pirouette with some diversions from my research, adding a curtsey at the end and having the leg outstretched completely. He is very talented. Again, I had issues wrangling the rig under control and there were times I accidentally broke his bones, but I managed to solve it at the end. Going slowly and not rushing helped a lot.
I had a lot of fun with the camera for the fear animation. It took me a while to understand how to position the camera correctly, but I zoomed it in close as he backed away to make it seem as if the viewer was chasing him.
Looking back, I wish I added in a wall to make it more obvious he was trapped. I wanted his knees to look like they were shaking but I wasn’t sure how, I moved the knobs back and forth but it’s quite hard to see. I also wish I could have moved his eyes to make him look worried as well.