Week 13 - Finished Game Animation?

    

    This could definitely use more cleanup, but here's a confident splined version of the game animation I was working on. With a lot of animation layers and adjustments to the root of the rig, I was able to get a decent looking preview of what could possibly be a (near) finished 60fps animation.

    The footing is still extremely hard to keep in place cleanly, as using the root control's rotation curve (or controller) makes for extremely obnoxious offset work that I have to do. I desperately need to find a way to rotate a character within a rig cleanly without offset work and having to do complete animation overhauls with animation layers.

    Actually nevermind, I think I have a solution (for another animation of course...): I suddenly remember a few behind the scenes videos on YouTube where people would do the root translation and rotation first in blocking, then pose on top of those rotations, rather than doing the posing and the root positions at the same time (in which was what I did).

    I really can see how a good blocking of your animation can truly lead to little to no problems in the long run, and I'm seemingly starting to begin to understand that. As the notes pile up for future reference, I'll definitely see myself doing a better job at blocking than getting straight into poses, or posing a bit too much. 







    
    

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 2 - Part of my Stepped Process

Image
     For my first project, like I said, I wanted to start off with something simple to get the ball rolling. And so, a simple "important pose to important pose" work will do just that. I want to get this animation done as fast, and as efficient as possible, so if I can get this quick pose-to-pose practice done, and rendered a little fancy (since I grabbed an HDRI for some good lighting and a mini background), I think I'll feel pretty good to do a big second project.     So I've ultimately decided to use this very nice looking Raphael from TMNT rig ( Link ), and to create a back turn into wave animation. I have reference for the back turn, as well as the wave, however I could only get to the back turning with my stepped process so far. A strategy I've been trying to use to be more efficient is to count how many frames between each key pose in my reference, so that I'm not scrambling to find where I should put each key pose. Was I supposed to do that at the very...
Read more

Week 5 - A bit of splining

      It seems I'll need a bit more time on this animation. From the beginning, I had an idea of how I wanted the animation to go, but not exactly much written down, or the estimated timing I needed for such poses. And so, I've gotten things a bit more planned than before, and from the get-go, I realize there's a lot more frames to be keyed than I thought there'd be.     I've remade my animation outline with the many key poses and their "build up to key pose" frames (anticipation, breakdown, in-betweens, etc .), but here’s a basic rundown of what’s to come: Idle Impact Stumble (left and right) Stop and Realization (or anger) Turn to face camera Disappointed Wave     I've made the verdict of putting keyframes to turn Ralph back to what he was viewing... if I give myself enough time to do so. But I digress: For this week, I worked on the first part of Ralph's stumble and impact of the ball hitting his head. There might be too minimal root controller...
Read more

Week 11 - Finding Errors

      Progress is not the best for the millionth time. It seems like my way of animating can look good (with good camera work), however isn't as organized as it could be.      Last class had discussed the head of the character being a little too wobbly or faster than the body, so that was fixed, as well as the foot bouncing as if the kick was done on a bouncy surface, in which was fixed. However, as I'm trying to move to splining, I seemingly can't get to this phase, mainly because I've offset the root control and rotate root (?) control too much from the overall animation of the character, thus creating a mess of trying to fix the root, then the character itself, and vice versa. Also for the tail, the animation looks good stepped, however when moved to spline I realize that the stepped poses of the tail do not fit as correctly as the orthographic view shows. I attempted to make my own tail poses that stray away from the source material, but to no avail. An...
Read more