Walk animation

Been tweaking and polishing curves all day. I wanted to do as much as possible before the show and tell tomorrow so I haven't rendered the animation yet, I decided to rather use the time it would have taken to render and composite to work on the actual piece itself. So I made a preview of the piece that I will bring to show the class, hopefully they won't be too disappointed by the lack of lighting and fancy effects in the piece. Hehe.


So, here's the preview I will be showing tomorrow:




Now; time for bed! It's been a long day with a lot of work, but it's worth it when you see how the animation evolves.

Linear mode

So I moved over from stepped to linear keys this morning and have been working all day on adding in-betweens and additional breakdowns. It's changed a bit due to the time limit and also because I realized I might have "bit over a bit more than I could chew". I guess I could have made it work with the extreme pose where he leans over, but it would have needed more time to make it look right. So I went back to try and keep it simpler and also to give some more time to the transition from the skip-like walk where he crosses the road and back to the tough guy-act.

- At least to me it looks better the way it is now.

The last thing I worked now was the fingers. They are a bit tricky since it's my first time working on actual movement with this rig (only done poses with it before), but I think I will figure it out.

It's getting pretty late and my eyes are "blind" on the animation now so I think I'll call it a night. I feel I've gotten a lot done today and hopefully I will be able to move on to spline and start polishing the curves tomorrow.

Got some feedback from my room-mate so I have a few things I might try and work into the piece, such as subtle hand-movements, but that's tomorrow.

So, Here's a preview of how the animation looks at the moment:

Blocking Angus walk

I have been blocking this weekend.
Finished the key poses yesterday and timed it out so I have started to work on the breakdowns now. I still work with stepped keys because I want to get as much information as possible in there before I have to move on to linear keys.
I am struggling a bit with the transition from calm and back to "tough guy", but hopefully it will be more clear now that I am working on pushing the poses a bit more. I want to exaggerate it so it's easier to understand, but I don't want to overdo it either.. Tricky stuff.

The hardest part is definitively the walk. I hope the attitude shows, because that is the only way to show Angus personality in this task. Could of course make a really tough facial expression but in the end, if the walk doesn't show him as tough it won't be believable.

I figured out the tempo yesterday on my way over to the lab. I watched people in front of me and counted the beats in my head, and almost everyone walked in so called march-time. When I walked behind them I counted about half a second for each step.
I acted it out as well, but it varied from 1 second to 1,6 so I decided to go with the tempo that looked best when I looked at my animation, so Angus is now walking on 12's. (normal walk)

Anyway, here are some wip videos:

Key-Poses:



Added breakdowns:



I had to get rid of a lot of poses yesterday. Angus was originally stretching and looking around more when he waited to cross the road. But I found that I needed a lot more time to work with to make this look good. Don't want the animation to suffer because it needs to rush from pose to pose, so I got rid of it and tried to work on a more subtle way to show him waiting. The important thing is that he loses his attitude and becomes calm and thoughtful.

The planning I have done so far

Been planning the walk-animation all day and have finished the following:

- Character profile (with back story)
- Storyboard
- A drawn example of a "walk with attitude"
- A drawn example of contrast in the silhouette when the attitude of the character changes.

The last two are mainly to help me figure out how the characters attitude should be at the different stages of the animation.

I Used more time than I usually do on a storyboard on this one, mainly because I wanted it to include as much information as possible. There is a a rough outline of the walk cycle along with the usual explanations of what is happening in the shot.
But I thought it would be worth spending a little more time on it since I can use it as reference for the key poses for the block as well.

I put the character profile and storyboard together in one image for you to view:



PS: It is quite big so it might be hard to read the text, but if you right-click the storyboard image and click "open image" you will be able to view the image in full size, and also zoom in).


And here are the two drawn examples of the characters attitude that I hope to achieve:

Show and tell, some more reference footage and planning

Today was the show and tell for the poses. According to the feedback I got my poses seemed to tell the story. I might push the first pose on "waiting to start" a bit further down, so that he nearly touches the dumbbells, but he's scared at the same time. (I need to do some changes to the staging to make this work tough..)
Was a lot of good and fun poses so there where a lot of laughs in the classroom so it was a fun session. And as usual Penny brought sweets and that always makes us happy!

After class I went into town to get a new sim-card, because my new shiny Iphone 4s arrived yesterday! Afterwards I went over to Phoenix to meet up with Jørgen to help him shoot his reference, so now I also know the phone works excellent for that. I also did some new reference shots for my own shot, just to be safe. (Did this because I was a bit unsure about the reference shots I got from the Green screen-shoot.)

Here are the reference videos I will be using for the walk animation:





(I have edited bits and pieces from several shots to make these, I'm sure I won't need them all but since I found interesting parts in a lot of them I chose to keep it).




As the image shows I am currently at the drawing & writing stage of the planning.
So far I have worked out the character-profile and the story and also done some sketches on attitude-walk poses:



I need to refine the style of the walk and do some more polished poses before I start working on the storyboard, so I can get a better idea of how the animation will look.
I am also reading the chapter on walks in "The Animator's Survival Kit".
(Richard Williams, 2001)
And there I found a sentence that I will keep in mind while I work on the attitude of the walk, since it fits to my character (description posted on the 26th of October in the blog);

"Women often take short steps in a straight line - legs close together = little up and down to the body, as opposed to mister macho".

The finished 3D poses

Here are the renders of the finished 3D poses I will be showing at tomorrows and and tell.







(I polished and edited them a bit in Photoshop so they would look a bit better since I never get satisfied with my lighting..)

Lecture and feedback

Today we had a lecture on "Body mechanics". It was some parts in there that some of us had been through before (the ones that did Penny's character animation module last year), but I have to say it was really helpful to get a repetition on the subject because this is a big one..
There are so many parts of it that relates to physics so it includes a lot of difficult phrases and terms. But when these get linked up to the animation-principles it really does make sense, and it also makes it easier to understand.
The most important things I learned today was on
Internal and External energy/force.

In short;
Internal energy comes from "inside" the character, it is acted out and mind-driven movement.

External energy/forces influence the character/object from the "outside"
(the nr.1 external force is gravity.)

We also learned about "inertia" and "momentum" which are a way to describe that objects want to stay still until it is for instance; pushed (inertia). It then wants to keep moving until it is forced to stop (momentum).

The most important thing to remember is that; Movement has meaning!

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Now, over to the poses and the feedback I got.

As I understood it five out of six poses are working pretty good, the thing I needed to change was the first pose in "What's inside". I quite like the staging in that pose, but I agree with the feedback which was that it leaves a gap between Jack in the fridge and the next pose where Jack is sitting on the floor.
So instead I sketched out a pose where he is sitting on the floor with the jar next to him,
and took a reference photo:



On the "Waiting to start"-sequence I need to stage it a bit different so that the dumbbells does not cover up so much of the poses, because at the moment you can't see the character in full. And since the dumbbells aren't going to be used in the scene for anything else than helping me tell the story, this is just poor camera-staging from my part.

- Also need to stick to one camera for each sequence.
(to keep some consistency to the sequences)


I have finished the drawn version of the new pose "What's inside"-pose and now I'm going to work on the 3D version.

And here is the new pose-sheet with a updated story to match the new pose: