Weeks 5 to 9, from the pendulum to the vanilla walk

Hey guys, long time no see. Here are 2 awesome videos Francis, an alumni from AM suggested me. They are a bit long but it's well worth it.

Oookay, I did let a bunch of posts accumulate hehe. Almost done with the first class, man how time flies, Already at the start of week 11. I'll just try to do it by chunks like last post. 

So here we go:

WEEK 5: 

In week 5 we had to do a devastation pose and the pendulum animation to learn about overlapping action. The video I mentioned in the last post is a great way to start.

Devastation is a very extreme form of sadness, after looking for a bunch of reference (suggestion: look for pictures of war and of people who lost everything on a natural disaster, its quite sad though).

Here are my sketches for this week:

I was between number 6 and 10 for the 3d pose so I did some tests and came up with these:

My class mate Gabriel called the first one "sexy devastation" lol. Anyway, two of my classmate really liked the bottom one better (and today I kinda agree with them :P) but I went with the sexy devastation pose. My mentor had some reservations about it and suggested some great changes to help make the meaning of the pose stronger. Something we always have to remember is the order of importance of the pose. 1st the meaning, 2nd the body mechanics and lastly design.

Here is my pendulum assignment planning:

I wanted to give a little personality ti it so created a little obstacle. He evades falling rocks to get to the exit. Here is the final animation:

                                     

The problem areas were the ones with rotation on the base, the chain needed extra attention so it doesn't appear to be locked in place. Another note was at the end where the chain moved too much on the anticipation. My mentor said that it was up to me to do a revision.

Here is the revision:

                                   

He liked the new results but is not a fan of the 3/4 view on the anticipation of the object.

Overlapping action is a important principle that will make your animation much more organic. I suggest looking into the Preston Blair book and the Animation Survival Kit for more in depth info. The important thing is to take notice how the main body movement affects the other parts. In this case the chain. It's all about breaking the joints correctly and copying curves (in 3d).

WEEK 6:

Yay, tailor assignment!!

No poses this week, sadly. This is the assignment that combines everything we learned so far, so we are supposed to show good control of overlapping, stretch and squash, timing, spacing...Its a bouncing ball combined with the pendulum, and its alive too. I as very exited to do this, so much that I went a little overboard and put too much into too few frames (our frame limit was so little :P).

Here is the plan:

So the idea is that in 5 sec, little Tailor  comes to the edge of the branch looks down, threatens to jump, enters a big anticipation and jumps. Big Tailor is coming see that little tailor is about to jump, he jumps back scared, jumps to the edge of the cliff, prepares to jump and jump rescuing the little one landing on the other side. I know, quite a lot of story bits in just 5 sec. What can I say, noob mistake lol. 

Here is the animation:

My mentor said just that, too busy, too much going on and the story beats was too similar to one another. But he liked the overlapping of the tail and the movement of the body. So as that is what really counts in this assignment he let me keep this little story, just asked me to change a few things like increasing the height of the tree so little tailor can fall for more time, some tweaks on the tail including a comp inbetween that I failed to see on little tailor. He let me go over the frame limits to make a few adjustments to the big anticipation of big tailor too. But that is for the next week hehe.

WEEK 7:

This week we just had to refine our tailor animation so it was a slow week, here is the result base on my mentor's note:

I was so glad he found that my adjustments improved the shot. I changed a few things besides of what he asked to help break the story beats a little. In the end I was quite satisfied with the result, I know and understand now the importance of restrain and the many mistakes I made story wise taught me many things. Sometimes more is less... To try to put so much in there the audience wouldn't be able to see it all and sometimes the meaning of the scene will be lost. So it would be better to let little tailor just hanging in there about to fall and to focus on the big tailor action, driving the audience to see his desperation and finally rescue. But I digress, this is more of a class 3 and 4 thing. I'm really grateful that my mentor took the time to teach me this and to point it out. 

Loved this week, learned a lot from this.

WEEK 8:

Guess what? Poses are back in the game till the end of class now :)

This week is strength pose and blocking a vanilla walk. 

Let's start with the poses, here are my sketches for week 8:

Chose sketch number 2, here is the result in 3d:

This time I focused more on the idea and less on design and it showed on the critique. My mentor said the idea was correct the main problem with this is the silhouette. He gave me a bunch of tips to make this more clear. I'll post the results on a later date.

Here is the plan for the animation:

This plan is more like a 2d way of doing it, today in 3d we could put the extreme of the rotation x of the body on the frames 0, 6 and 12 so it creates a nice overlapping.

Here's the blocking:

                                      

Notice the movement of the hips as the leg stretch in the passing position the side of the hips for that leg goes up. That movement became clear to me when my mentor said to see how a quadruple walks and how its hips behave.

A good way to measure the distance your character is going to walk in translate z is to get the values of the the tz for both legs, add one to the other and that's how much your body should move in one step. Really simple when you think it like this. Remember that the curve for the Tz of the body should be linear. 

This is for when you are doing pose to pose animation. 

You can do the vanilla walk in layered animation too, here is a good video that explains it:

                                  

More on walks you can find in this link : http://www.youtube.com/user/AlejandroLuisGarcia

And of course within the books I already mentioned. Page 108 from the Survival Kit has a great recipe for a vanilla walk.

WEEK 9:

This week we took our blocking to spline, yay. And so out archenemy shows...the knee popping.... I swear it's no joke, the knees takes a lot of work hehe. Anyway the pose for the week was concern, here are my sketches:

And here is the 3d result:

The main thing my mentor said he wanted to see is the elbow supporting the head more (its difficult to do cause of the giant head :P ). Also suggested to move the camera a little so the table is not too distracting.

Here is how the animation turned out to be:

                                       

I was very happy my mentor liked it, there was a few little adjustments to do though. 

As for the knees I found out that tracking is the best way to go, if you are an AM student you can use the am tracker, if not there's this great tracker: http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/animation/c/arc-tracker that you can use. 

I myself did this for Ballie character:

Here's how I do it (not by any means its a the better way, its just the way I'm used to):

-Create 2 locators (menu: create>locator) and rename them so you don't get lost. (ex. loc_knee_r and loc_knee_l)

-go to the outliner and expand the ballie_etc, ballie_ac_rig and ballieac_dnt.

-select ballie_lo_R_knee (the geo of the right knee) and ctrl select the loc_knee_r locator that you created.

-with both selected go to constrain>parent and click in the little box to go to options, there make sure maitain offset is off.

-click in apply and the loc should always follow the knee now. If you can´t see the loc, just scale it until its visible.

-do the same for the other knee.

- now you can use the AM arc traker (or any other tracker) on the locators to see the path of the knees.

For a character similar to ballie you will have to look for the geometry of the knee and constrain the locator to that geo. 

For any character, including ballie you can constrain the locator to the joint of the knee. You might have to look for it on the outliner if its hidden but in most rigs you can see the joints and skeleton of the character.

After that it's a question of using stretch attribute of the legs to change its size slightly and make the knee always move forward during the animation and creating a nice and clean curve. 

As for the feet you can track the heel or ankle, or even the control of the foot in most rigs and track it. 

It should have a curve like this one: http://minyos.its.rmit.edu.au/aim/a_notes/p_images/foot_action.jpg

This is it, I'll not tell about last week as it's a blocking for the character walk, I'll wait after I finish the animation to post it here. Thanks for reading this immense post and hope you are liking my work. 

Class 2 is fast approaching and with it more complex characters :)

Peace!