(Term 1: Week 7 & 8)
This week we learnt about body mechanics in animation and was assigned to do a short animation for this topic.
Body mechanics can be described as the way character body change and move from one pose to another pose. A great body mechanics animation is when the sequence of movement through the body is prepared and timed properly to describe the intended action for audience to believe that the character moved. Some good examples to show a full body mechanics are gymnastic, parkour and even as simple as a character lifting a heavy object.
References
For this week task, I planned to do a short parkour action. It is different than the previous character animation tasks as the character will not doing a repetitive animation like walk cycle but instead, a variety of continuous actions from start to finish. It can be hard to animate this complex motion using only imagination or by designing the action from scratch. So, a good video reference from the parkour expert itself can help a lot.
I then proceeded to find the references online. After searching for several hours, I noticed that there are actually many good parkour videos but some of them are not suitable as animation reference because of shaky camera movements and extreme angles in the video. Most of the videos also are a fast cut compilation of short parkour clips which very hard to follow. For the reference, I’m looking for a video with consistent camera angle.
I finally found a video by StuntsAmazing on YouTube which has the criteria I wanted. I took a small portion of the video as a reference for my animation.
Storyboard & Movement Observation
The following are the key poses that I identified from the video.
From the video and storyboard, we can see the person doing 2 jumps that require 360 degree rotation for the whole body in the animation process later.
For the first jump, the person lands with his left hand touching the ground first (pose 5) and followed by his right hand (pose 6). This may require IK control to make the hands stick to the ground while the body still moving during the animation process. There is a follow through and overlapping motion for the legs during the jump. At the end of the first jump, he lands his right foot first (pose 7) and then the left foot (pose 8).
The person continues to make 2 small run cycles (from pose 8 to pose 13). He then makes the second jump which is a roll jump. During the jump, there is a ‘squash and stretch’ happening. The person squeezes his legs to the body (pose 15) and extend them back when he lands with both hands (pose 16), followed by his back (pose 17) and then his left foot (pose 18).
Blocking
For this week task, we need to get the blocking done first and then continue for final animation after we receive feedbacks from Luke.
This time, I used another character called ‘Sam’ because I think his anatomy is much better to practice the body mechanics animation than the previous ‘Thepp’ character.
As usual, I begin with placing down all the key poses based on the storyboard using the ‘step tangents’ in the Graph Editor. I think the process was not too hard since the character rigs are quite easy to control even though I just used to this character. The only minor problem was the reference video has some blurry frames because of motion blur. So I had to anticipate and predict some of the body parts placement especially for the hands and foots.
Blocking Video
Feedbacks
These are feedbacks from Luke:
– Fix curve for the body / spines
– Add more overlapping motion to the legs
Polishing
After I received the feedbacks, I begin fixing the original blocking first and followed the poses suggested by Luke.
Then I started the splining and polishing stage. Right after I converted the keyframes to ‘Auto tangents’, I instantly noticed some problems with rotation animation especially for the arms and foots. They are now doing a funny spinning motion throughout the animation.
I made this mistake during the pose-to-pose blocking where I just rotated each body part without paying attention to their rotation direction. When the body doing a full rotation to positive direction for example, I should rotate the other body parts to the same direction. I didn’t noticed this problem before because ‘Step tangents’ will not show the in-between motion. This is something I should take note of to prevent the same mistake in the future.
I managed to fix some of the problems using the Graph Editor by aligning the curve to have proper increment at each axis direction. But it became a too complicated since the rotation directions are mixed between the axis and keyframes. The easiest way I found was to delete the problematic rotation keys and recreate the key by rotating it back to its intended position through the right direction.
There were a lot of full rotations going on throughout the animation and I spent most of the time to fix them. I think this was the biggest problem happened in this task which I learnt a lot. The other parts were almost the same as the previous assignment like offsetting some keys to create overlapping motion, and changing the animation curves to control the slow in and out.
Final Animation