Week 4 - Refinement and Pushing for Spline Process

 


    Taking advice from my peers and teacher, as well as watching a few videos on animation keyframing and timing, I've begun to get a better understanding on when and where to put keyframes for my animation. Although I didn't get as much as I'd want to within the blogpost timeframe, I'm definitely getting a better workflow with the info I nabbed from last week. 

I made sure to create two maya files that had my initial key poses, and one that had my over-keyed frames. And so, I went back to my initial key pose file, and got a bit more correct timing on Ralph's idle before eventually getting hit by the ball. 

Now, I would like to explain what fixes I've made to the animation so far that my peers told me about:

  • The twitch on the leg from before was fixed and refined, however one of the feet are a little still so I'll make sure to add more animation to it.
  • I'm going to be working with a still camera from now on until next week, where I will ensure that the animation is splined and rendered. People had been saying that the shaky camera (a personal favorite of mine in video games) made it look like it was Ralph having random keyframes everywhere, so I made it more visible that he's in an idle pose.
  • I'm assuming that the center of gravity is the actor's pelvis and overall animation of their weight, so I tried to ensure the weight of the bulky model would look a bit better from last week's in-betweens and key poses.
  • Exaggeration is still a work in progress, as I've been trying to make Ralph whip out his hand a bit more to sort of stretch it out, but at the moment I believe it's a little too slow.
  • Lastly, the initial posing was drawn out way too slowly, so I quickly condensed the idle pose before he gets hit, and I'd say it looks pretty alright. 
The last steps of the animation are definitely in progress and are planned to be done next week so I can think of another simple and short piece for my portfolio.






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