Animation Practise

To begin with the animation process by looking at my planning sheet. This would act as a guide for where certain poses would take place on the obstacle course. Once the rig had been the setup I manipulated the position of each joint to get the character into a more natural position which would look more lifelike than a T  pose.

taking into account timing and observation I setup a large reference library of images and videos containing movements including certain parkour stunts which I would utilise as a guide as it provided real world examples of movement which I could reflect within the virtual 3D space.

I began setting up the key poses which would be included within a single movement, for example the jump at the beginning was comprised of the launch, contact and end, This 3 keyframes would render some of the basic structuring to the jump, once i was happy with these 3 key poses I evaluated the positioning of the keyframes on the timeline to ensure the timing is as accurate as possible for the jump and that it looks natural, for this video reference became especially useful. Once i was satisfied with how i had observed and timed the basic animation i needed to add in the secondary poses that would act as in-betweens. The addition of these secondary frames added more accuracy to the animation as without these the interpolation wouldn’t provide results which look convincing as that simply handles the ins and outs. Therefore adding these would give me more control over the animation.

When working on the front flip I was faced with a problem which was being caused by the graph editor. Once the flip was at the half way point, the movement decelerated temporarily. This was due to the graph editor handling the ins and outs which were placed between the keyframes, this created an additional curve in the hip X/Y/Z rotation channels. In order to fix this I removed the extra point on the curve which smoothened it out. I continued through the rest of the animation using this method.

 

Animation

 

Prior animation practise for obstacle course. This allowed me to get more comfortable with the animation tools in Maya and the importance of observation.