Week: 7 – 13 June

With less than 2 weeks before dateline, I was very eager to start with the character animations phase that I targeted to animate at least 2 or 3 shots this week even though there were still some shots that have yet to be tracked. I want to do something different than tracking this week after the ‘Camera Tracking Mayhem’ last week. So doing animation could help me to refresh my mind a bit. Since I had about half of the shots tracked, I can slip to animation and see if I discover any problems quicker so I still have time to make any changes.

I decided to begin with Shot11 first. In this scene the character (Zeo) will dodge bullets several times and jump while spin his body slightly in slow motion towards the end of the shot. I don’t actually recorded the video in slow motion, but with the visual and camera movements on second half of the video, I think I can just animate the character with fake slow motion without looking weird when combined with the non-slow-mo video.

First thing I did was to match the size of the character with the environment by scaling the camera group with its tracking markers. The markers position on the floor was already correct, so to scale the camera properly without making the markers going below the floor, I cannot simply change the camera size using its own pivot but from the center grid. A bit different than Maya & 3dsmax, Blender has something called 3D Cursor that we can place anywhere and use as a temporary pivot. So I used the cursor by changing the ‘Transform Pivot Point’ to ‘3D Cursor’ which located at the center and scale from there.

Then I began making the key poses for the character. I used ‘Auto Keying’ to automatically key any changes I made to the controllers and bones.

During this process, I referred the actions and poses that I’ve chose from the Killer Bean animation.

After I got every single pose I want, I locked the full-body pose by selecting all the bones and controllers and keyed them by pressing ‘I > Location & Rotation’. This method was to prevent it from changing when I alter any next or previous key poses. I also changed the F-Curve interpolation to ‘Constrant’ (step) so I can focus on the blocking poses and not distracted by the in-between motion.

I continued making all the key poses and below are some of them.

I exaggerated some poses to make the action more visible during fast movement.

And of course the exaggeration was not pretty on different angle.

During the blocking process, I’m not really focus on the timing yet so it may off a bit. I will adjust the timing more during the splining phase. Below is the first blocking of Shot11.

Next, I proceeded with Shot10 and then Shot09, Shot08 and Shot07. It seem now that my animation flow was animating from back to the front. But I think that’s okay since it is the last few shots that have a lot of elements that I want to highlight in my showreel. So in a worse case scenario if I didn’t manage to finish all the shots, I would have the last few shots that I wanted ready before the dateline.

For all those 4 shots, the animation process was almost the same as what I did with the Shot11 before and below are the blocking videos:

While doing the blocking, I did go back and forth to some of the shots to match the continuity of the first and last poses.