(Term 1: Week 2)

Task 1: Tail Ball

As continuation from the last week bouncing ball animations, this week we were assigned to make a bouncing tail ball animation. There are some similarities in term of movement and principles for the body. The significant different this time is the character has an additional component attached to the body which is a tail that require follow through and overlapping action animation.

Follow Through and Overlapping Action are two closely related principles which help to give the impression that characters or objects follow the laws of physics. Follow through is when connected body parts or objects will continue moving after the main body has stopped. Overlapping Action is how different parts or object tend to move at different rates.

References

Here are some references I found online for the tail movement.

Familiarization

In the previous week task I don’t use any controller to animate the bouncing ball, but this time the character is already rigged with controllers for the body and tail.

The tail consisted of 3 segments which has 4 controllers to control its bend. The body has an additional controller for squash & stretch while the ‘Root’ controller at the bottom has a ‘hidden’ option on the right panel to change the plain character’s face to fox or beaver. These are some of the new things I learned about how the rig and UI work in Maya. 

Before start animating, I played around with all the controllers to identify their potentials and limitations during the animation process.

Animation Process – Body (Primary)

My plan is to animate the body (primary) movement first before proceeding with the swinging tail (secondary) as the tail will follow and react to the body motions.

I made the jumping motion to have some variations in terms of height and timing. At some parts, I let the fox to quickly jump again after it lands and stop for several frames at some other parts to make the movement looks more realistic and natural.

Without any adjustment to the animation curve, the fox movement will looks floating and wavy. I then proceed to fix it in the Graph Editor. The final curves are quite identical to the bouncing ball which has smooth wide curves when the character in the air and sharp ‘V’ shapes when the character hitting the ground to create proper slow in and out motion as the character being pulled by gravity.

After I satisfied with the main jumping motions, I then added the squash and stretch motion using the controller at the top of the character which can only move up and down (y-axis) parallel to the body. I tried not to overdo it, but I did add a bit of exaggeration to the squash shape to make it more obvious during the fast motion. The final part is to add overlapping motion to the squash & stretch by offsetting the keyframes for one or two frames late than the body motion.

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Animation Process – Tail (Secondary)

The next step is to animate the tail which I think is more challenging and complicated than the body motion as the tail has several parts that move at different rates and directions. I think arcs play an important role here as my lecturer, Luke pointed out during his demo, the tail must follow the trail of the body and its tip must always try to point to its last position.

The tail should look soft, light and flexible towards its tip like a hair but with some controls towards its base. To do this, I used the keyframe overlapping / offset method for different parts of the tail combined with some manual frame by frame adjustment for better control of their directions. I spend most of the time perfecting (and also redoing) the tail motion.

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I learned a lot during the whole process in terms of animation principles and technical. There are some back and forth process / try and error when controlling the curves and character controllers.

I also getting more comfortable working around in Maya except for some UIs suddenly disappear and my muscle memory keep directing me to press the Blender shortcut!

Final animation

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Task 2: Half-body Walk (Blocking)

In the second task of this week, we were assigned to animate a walking animation of a half body character to practice the layout and blocking stages.

Character walk cycle can be considered as one of the most important things for animator to learn and know. That being said, it is also one of the most difficult basic animations to master. Referring to the The Animator’s Survival Kit by Richard Williams, each step is broken down into four poses, which are contact, down (low), passing position and up (high).

References

When animating, there are several steps or stages to follow to make the process especially complex motion much easier to work on. Some of the steps are; previs / layout, blocking and splining.

Previs / layout – This is where animator will define the position and movement path of the characters and cameras from position A to B in the shot. Some important key poses also can be added as planning for the scene.

Blocking – Animator will add all the key poses for the characters. During this process, usually a ‘stepped curve mode’ is used so that the animator can focus on the poses and not distracted by the in-between motions.

Splining – This is actually a 3D animation term where animator will convert the keyframes interpolation from stepped to spline so the transition between one pose to another pose will look smoother. But the automatic interpolation will not usually give the best result, so the animator will have to tweak the animation curves to make the motion looks more realistic and believable.

Here are some of the references I found online:

Animation process

As pointed by Luke, we will need to animate the character and its legs to actually walking forward without moving the root as it will produces more accurate motion and position for the footsteps.

I primarily used the reference from John McMurrough since the character and structure is the same. Based on that, the timing is 12 frames for the first half of the cycle and 24 frames for the complete cycle.

I started the walk cycle pose with left foot at the front. I set the first ‘contact’ pose at frame 0, ‘down’ pose at frame 3, ‘passing position’ pose at frame 6, ‘up’ pose at frame 9 and then the second ‘contact’ pose at frame 12. This is only the first half of the cycle so the right foot is at the front now. The complete cycle is when the left foot is back to the front position.

I then continued blocking the character poses for frame 15, 18, 21 and 24 by manually mirroring and referring the first half cycle poses. I used the ‘translate’ and ‘rotate’ number in the channel box and also by comparing the opposite key poses back and forth. I don’t want to copy the exact number so I can still make all the opposite poses in the walk cycle look identical but organic at the same time. After the first cycle finished, I continued to complete 4 more cycles that ended at frame 120. This time I also used the grid to estimate the location of the character body parts for each step.

During the whole proses I used the ‘Step tangents’ to all keyframes so I can focus on blocking the poses. I also made some adjustment to the hip, legs and foot postures after the 5 cycles completed. Regarding the character rigging, I found that it has all the necessary controllers, including all the detail parts such as foot roll, foot break, and toe roll which are great for me to pose the character properly.

Final animation