Final 493 Senior Portfolio Post - Semester 2

 

    Hello! Welcome to my last senior portfolio blogpost. I would like to discuss the problems and successes of this semester’s animation work, and overall, how I did as a whole in improving myself as an animator.

Previous works that I couldn't touch up on

    This is my second semester of senior portfolio. My first semester focused very intensely on one animation, as key poses weren’t the absolute best, as well as there being too many of them in the stepping process. I was able to get another animation in last minute, however it, and the dialogue animation lacked true polish and cleanup.

    My goals were to polish quick, and simple animations (preferably 3 of them), rather than presenting myself with difficulty right off the bat, as well as obtaining a better understanding of keyframing as a whole. However, like I always do, I ended up going on a wild tangent with my first animation, as well as finding a few complications throughout the semester.

 

Initial Reference and Idea

Initial Idea of 1st Animation

Better Keyposing down the Road

Snippet of the splined "calm before the storm" idle animation

    This semester had shown the same problem as last semester, sadly. When starting off this semester’s animation, in which showcased a “snowball”, as my teacher would rather call it, impacting off of the TMNT turtle Raphael’s head. I had prepared video reference of a rather simple idea, and although not the best acting was created, the reference helped a decent amount.

 

Progress on the stumble

    I then wanted to expand upon the animation, wanting to create a stumble, and then leading to the realization that the people recording (as I added camera shake to simulate someone holding a camera) are the ones who threw it. This was looking to be good progress, but then I met my worst enemy: Dealing with the root controller of the rigs.

 

    Instead of plotting out root control translation and rotation, I would plot out the certain parts of the body first, and then the root control afterwards, which provided terrible results. This stunted my stepping of the expansion of my progress, as moving to splining showcased my blocked key frames not being as nice looking as I’d thought.

 

Final Progress

    This eventually led to me cutting the animation to just an impact hit, and however having the turn around a little too fast, decently sold the impact of the ball hitting.

 

    This then led me to my 2^nd animation, due to my 1^st animation feeling as though it were getting nowhere (rushing into splining without proper cleanup of key poses), in which was a 3D copy of a 2D animation of an upwards kick attack from within the video game “Skullgirls”.   

 

    One miniature problem I had at the beginning was that I could not read, and see that the readme.txt provided with the rig stated that it needed a rig plugin installed onto Maya, so the rig could work properly, so I had some complications with not being able to step animation at the beginning, as it would default to splining and nothing else. 

Side by side timing comparison

But besides that, I had believed to be making good progress on the animation, as I was able to get a good grasp on the fast and zippy animation of an attack that the player controls, rather than it being an enemy. I had been told in what I believe to be my motion capture class that enemy attacks can look as expressive and detailed as possible (as well as having many keyframes to show startup and the end of an attack). However, when it comes to game animation where the player controls the main character, they want a flashy, responsive character to control, and so I was able to replicate the speed of the fighting game character’s upwards kick.

Root Control Problems

    Then it hit me. The unorganized stepping/blocking of my animation made splining a living hell, as many body parts would struggle to stay in a uniform look. My root control, as seen in the video, moved too much in the z axis, as I had been moving it to better sell that her body was rotating for the kick.

 

    In addition to this, there was a separate root rotation curve that I did not use until the last second that was intended for rotating the rig. So instead, I accidently went and rotated the main root, in which also stunted progress.

 

Final Progress

    I was able to fix a bit of the stepping, and as the semester began to come to an end, I decided to put my own timing on it. Although I decided to ignore the rule of making the animation quick and snappy for the player, it was good practice for creating my own fluid timing with what reference animation I worked with.

 

   I was definitely able to learn that animating the root control and it's rotation curve first is a must (if there's any movement outside the bounds of the root control's circle I guess), as progress will be stunted if you use it last, as well as working on my timing and holds of my animations.

 Overall, if not for the busy semester I had (as well as terrible workflow and testing of the rigs used), I’m sure I could’ve polished these animations a lot more. But, as my time at this school comes to an end, as well as my license in Maya, I will continue to create better pieces for my portfolio on my spare time, as my teachers recommended, in other programs such as SFM and Blender (in which I will definitely have to learn quick). Thank you for reading.