Week: 1 – 7 March

I proceeded with the blocking stage for the character performance animation. I followed the reference video footages closely with some minor adjustments.

Scene Preparation

For this animation, I used David and Sam character from the Luke’s resource share.

I made some adjustments to the Sam’s face and head shape to turn him from handsome to somewhat a bit of crazy person. I made him bald by hidden his hair so his head now resembled the original character (Kane) from the audio clip.

As I practiced in the collaborative project, I used referencing system when importing both characters into the scene so that any changes to the character models will be applied back automatically to the animation file.

I also setup a quick select set for each David and Sam. This is sort of like a bookmarking system where I can quickly select the main or frequently use bones and controllers when posing the characters in the blocking and animation stage.

Finally I created a camera and a simple plane as the floor. I locked both the camera and plane so they would not accidently move or change when I’m doing the character blocking and animation.

Blocking

After everything ready, I started by blocking out Sam character first. I used the quick select function very much during the process. I keyed all his bones for every key pose that I referred from the reference video. This method was to lock the exact pose and prevent it from changing when I alter any next or previous key poses.

After I got about 2/3 duration of Sam blocking, I moved to block David character. David is a secondary character in this performance animation and he’s not moving much throughout the scene. But when he moves I want to make him standout a little with his facial expressions, hand gestures and the use of prop which in this case, a cigar.

Speaking about the cigar, this little prop will swap the places its attach several times in the scene. The cigar will go from mouth to fingers and back to mouth again. I cannot simply use the standard constrain / parent as it will attach to one place only. I also cannot manually animate the cigar to follow the movement of the head, mouth and hand because it’s quite impossible to get perfect animation for that.

One way to do it is to use ‘dynamic constraint’ where it can attach and change to different parent at certain frames. I knew how to do this trick in 3dsmax since I used this technique quite a lot in my previous projects, but I’m clueless how to do it in Maya. So I headed to YouTube and search a tutorial about this matter and I found one that clearly showing just that. I tested it in my scene and it works!

Below is the first blocking for the character performance animation. I didn’t managed to finish all the blocking before this week class. So I uploaded what I have so far to Ftrack so Luke can give his feedback during the class session.

Playblast