I’ve started planning for my next animation! Keeping with the parkour theme, I want to try doing a run with vaults/jumps over objects. I love their poses as they jump over things, so I want to experiment with that. Something a little shorter, but just as focused. Since things have been busy at work, I’m not quite sure how much time I can dedicate to this, but we’ll see.

Here’s the finished product. Of course, there’s always room for improvement. I widened the gap to make the landing a little more believable, made adjustments to the jump pose, and tried to make the poses a little punchier, but looking at it now it’s not so noticeable. That’s one thing that always bothers me when it comes to smoothing out animation; I tend to lose my poses. If anyone has any advice to preserving poses while smoothing, let me know.

Here’s part 2 of splining. Note to self, things are easier the more detailed the blocking is. Again, my challenges were with the arms and switching from FK/IK.

Let me know what you think!

This is the first half of the animation, splined out. The jump at the end is definitely not refined yet, but any crits on the running + stumble + running again are greatly appreciated. I changed the footing upon falling, making the stumble a little slower, and tried to accent the acceleration from stumble to running as per your crits. I think I might’ve made things a little too slow on some spots, though; please let me know what you think.

I definitely hit a lot of rough patches with this stumble. Smoothing out the movements from blocking to spline took me a lot longer than expected (probably because it involves more body movement than my previous exercise). Also, smoothing out the switch between FK and IK was also time consuming.

Onto the second half of the animation!

Worked on the blocking over the past week. Any crits are greatly appreciated, as I continue to refine it. Some parts feel slow (particularly his running), but last time I blocked my animation I had too many parts where it was incredibly fast when I started splining. I’m also not quite sold on his jump. What do you think?

Again, blocking helps tons. It makes things easy to change and forces me to focus on posing. I’m thinking this workflow’s a keeper.