Week 6's session of animation 102 was focused on perfecting our walking animations in Maya, and we could look to James for advice on our work. I showed my work to James for his opinion and he suggested moving the contact point of the feet in the rig further forward than the first attempt. Following this advice I performed a second attempt on doing the exercise. I opened my relax pose file and moved the feet further forward than before, and repeated this on the remaining foot steps. I played the animation back and whilst it was an improvement over the first animation it was a little slow and I felt that this could be improved and lacked humanity.
I used the Translate Y key channel on the contact points to make it look like the character was moving more realistically and I felt it was a good idea to add to the animation. An idea popped into my head, and saving this as a separate file I decided to add some movement in the feet. This was inspired by walking animation work that Stephan had done using the images in the Animators Survival kit as a guide, which he advised I should attempt to follow. I began by taking my existing animation and as I scrolled through the animation, I translated the key channels on the feet controls lifting them up as the legs moved across. The film was played back and I was beginning to think it was working very well. However there were some bad elements such as the lagging when the feet were beginning to lift up from the ground.
I may need to look at the idea when we are introduced to the next stage of walking.
I showed my previous animation to James for his opinion and he said I was on the right track but the leg needed to come a little further forward to make the contact point move the character faster. So I tried again, and moved the legs further forward from the last animation and moved the rig along to the next contact point. I played the animation and it worked well and then added the moving up and down of the pelvis. However there was an issue I hadn't encountered, the movement was not showing and so I added them again, however this had another side effect. The movement of the rig seemed rather jigged, and it made me think the rig was listening to some music as it was walking along. Whilst a good touch of emotion I felt it wasn't working for the rig contact points and it slowed down half way through which didn't look very real.
I therefore tried again, and made sure that this time the movements in the pelvis were captured in the walk. The animation seemed to run very smooth and there was no lagging in the feet or leg movements, this would have to be one of my more refined versions of the animations I'd done thus far. I did have one concern and it was as the character walked the rig began to break on the feet. Thankfully the solution was in the graph editor and shortening the leg movement frames eliminating the issue.I felt relived that I was making progress with the walking exercise and then I decided to turn my attention to other exercises.
Having learned of the story element in the module exercises I decided to revisit the sitting down standing up exercise adding the storytelling element of the character attending an airshow. I had an idea of what to do and so I asked Maddie to help me in recording reference footage. I acted I was looking up at the sky watching the aircraft in the sky moving my head following them, and standing up I held my hand up high like a look out on a ship.
Reference footage.
This was translated onto a bar sheet, this time I considered the time to do the bar sheet along with that from last weeks walking stopmotion. In Maya I placed the rig into a sitting position with the hands on the rigs knees as was recommended to me by Georgia a few weeks ago. The difficult element of the animation was getting the timing of the different limb movments from the bending down of the spine to the moving of the arms and hands on the knees. I had more troubles when doing the arms as I discovered last week making the arms move affected the begining key frames and moved too soon. So I altered the frames moving through the animation.
Despite the issues of the arms and timing I felt that this was a good animation, but clearly I had much to improve on and consider.
Looking back on the session I would've done some things differently, one of which would be asking for Jame's opinion on the sitting down standing up animation and how to avoid the issue of the frames moving too soon as it was difficult studying from the reference footage. In terms of the walks I would've tried to see if I could incorporate the poses from the survival guide into my animation and ask for a second opinion from Stephan to get a better idea of how this was done.
In hindsight I should've tried to account for the timing and spacing in the animation and placed hold key frames into the standing up animation to avoid the arms moving too soon. However I didn't force the rig breaking in the feet of the walks, and the fact I considered the graph editor as a solution was a surprise and a more logical approach. In conclusion I feel that the exercises whilst difficult proved insightful into future solutions and approaches I shall see if anyone in the group has any other ideas on how to approach the exercises and further refine them.
In future I shall consider the timing and the spacing of the movements in the rig along with the concept of introducing hold frames in the arms before executing the movements to avoid them moving too soon. I shall also ask for a second opinion from James to see how it would be best to approach it and execute accordingly. I shall also try relying more on the graph editor in future in case the rig breaks again.
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