(Term 1: Week 4)
This week we learned about stylised walk. Stylised animation is usually used to show characteristic and emotion of the character such as happy, funny and sad. In cartoon, these actions are exaggerated to make the elements more visible to the audiences.
The stylized walk can be quite different than the regular walk because the character will have some styles to its movement. This might cause the animation to have irregular timing and poses in each walk cycle.
For this week task I decided to use the same character as the previous assignment called ‘thepp’ since I already familiar with its rig, so I can focus more on practicing and producing a good stylised walking animation.
Reference & Storyboard
Luke encourages us to record our own acting or find any good video references for the animation and capture the key poses as a storyboard. By looking at actual acting, we will understand more about the proper poses and small details in the movement.
After looking for several references, I decided to do the stylized walking animation based on this video:
It’s a happy style walk that I think very suitable for my character. From the video, I identified and captured 13 key poses for 1 complete cycle. Below are the key poses from the video:
From the reference, we can see the basic poses from regular walk are still there. The foot still lands on heel during the first contact with the ground (frame 1, 7 & 13). The case might be different with another style of walking such as ‘sneaking’ where the toe will touch the ground first when making a step.
There are some interesting arcs and timing in the movement. The upper body motion is quite exaggerated than the lower part. Some basic key poses are also at different arrangement when compared to the regular walk. The ‘up’ pose (frame 3 & 9) comes first after the ‘contact’ and the ‘down’ pose is combined with the ‘passing position’ (frame 5 & 11).
Some poses are also slightly different from the first half to the second half of the walk cycle. Certain body parts are moving at irregular timing at the supposedly identical poses. One notable fact is that the person didn’t lift his foot too high when moving forward. I might exaggerate some of the poses during the animation process to make it look more interesting and visible.
Blocking
I started creating all the key poses for the character based on the reference. The pose-to-pose blocking process is similar to the previous week assignment. I set all the keys to ‘step tangents’ so I can focus on the poses only and not the in-between motions yet.
Usually, I don’t worry too much about timing when doing the blocking since I will tweak them heavily during the polishing stage. What matter most during the blocking stage is to get the right poses. But to get a better sense of the stylised motion, I made a rough timing that similar to the original video. The image sequences in the storyboard are actually 4 to 5 frames different between each other in the original video. I make the character arm swing a bit more and exaggerated some poses for the foot lifting and spine bending. To match with the happy walk, I also keyed a simple smiling and excited face expression to some of the poses.
Splining
After all the blocking done, I converted the keyframes to ‘Auto tangents’ in the Graph Editor. The software will automatically create the curves the animation, so now the character is moving smoothly but the timing is a bit off.
As I learned from the previous assignments, I think I’m getting better with Maya Graph Editor to read and predict how the motion will come out when I adjust the curve to certain shapes. During this process I mostly spend time tweaking each curve to have either a nice continuous smooth line or sharp shape to control the slow in and out motions.
As Luke keep suggesting during his lecture, to always tweak the main body part first, which is the hip since it will have great influence to the other body parts. I think for this animation, the body bouncing motion is quite hard to imitate. I’m not quite sure but I think in the video, there is a very subtle double bounce each time the person stepping forward. The motion may relate to hip and spines. So I tried to imitate the motion by adding slight bump in the curves and also by bending the spines. But after numerous attempts, the motion become quite weird and at some area it snap, So I decided to ignore the subtle bounces for this time.
After I’m happy with the body motion, I then focus to refine the curves for the legs and foots first before I proceed with the arms and hands.
Before proceeding with the polishing stage, I think the animation is quite slow, so I decided to speed up the timing a bit to make it look more cartoony. I rescaled the timing by reducing all the keyframes distance in the Graph Editor to make the motion faster. Thankfully, most of the splining motions that I’ve done before are still intact and need some minor tweaks only.
Polishing
For the polishing part, I did some follow through and overlapping movement adjustments especially to the head, arm and hands by offsetting their timing. In this case I offset most of the keyframes by 1 or 2 frames behind, so they would appear to move a bit slower than their parent counterparts. Hand would move slower than the lower hand and the lower hand would move slower than the upper hand and so on. I would also add motion to the fingers but in this case it’s not necessary since the hands are in a fist pose.
Before I wrap it up, I added a subtle jumpy motion to the eyebrows when the character bounces his body. I think it’s not very visible but enough to make it look a bit detail for this character.
Final Animation