The beginning of this month, term 2 of Animation Mentor started. This class is called “Psychology of Body Mechanics” and Dave Vallone is my mentor. Dave is an incredibly experienced animator with his 15+ years of animating both 2d and 3d at studios like Blue Sky, Sony, Blur, and ReelFX. I’m enjoying the class so far. Physical animation is the bread and butter of video game animation so I’m hoping to learn a TON this term. 🙂
This class is a bit different assignment-wise than last. We have more time (3 – 4 weeks per assignment) and less assignments (only 3 to hand in this semester). Also, we have more options in choosing what we animate. Each assignment provides a list of 10 different physical activities using a specific rig for each assignment. For Assignment 1, we had to use Ballie, the same one we used for our personality walk last term.
For Assignment 1, I chose “walking up the stairs” from the pick list. I knew I wanted him to have some sort of personality going up or down the stairs. In the end, I decided to go with the exhausted-dying-as-he-reached-the-top-of-the-stairs personality. Below is the final version.
The process is located below the cut…
For the first week we had to film video reference (or find it online) of us exploring different ways to approach the topic. I wanted to do some sort of personality walk up or down the stairs and since my apartment stairwell isn’t well lit, I decided to film it at work with the help of my friend’s steady cam expertise. After filming, planning began. I found a useful tool at the 11 Second Club that adds a nice big counter in the corner of your movie. In QT, you can do that easily upon playback, but this is useful for presentation purposes.
I mostly looked at the hip rotations and the timing for each step. I knew each step was going to take longer than a normal step, but it still needed to have some weight. I decided that the feet would start slow then quickly move to each step to catch the heavy hips. So, larger gaps of spacing were made when the legs moved forward to catch itself, but smaller when it’s trying to push the hips up. Also there’s heavy use of forward/backwards rotation on the hips as each leg moved forward.
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Blocking was the 2nd week’s assignment which covers the keys, breakdowns, and timing of the animation. The whole point of the blocking phase is to tell the main idea of your animation. Someone should be able to look at it and know exactly what your character is going to do next, BUT with the most efficient use of the keys possible (so it’ll be easy to make changes as needed).
I originally had Ballie rolling around at the end using his knee as the pivot (as you can see from my planning sketches). One of my peers cautioned me about the difficulties of getting a knee to plant on the ground; she was definitely right. Maybe when I gain more expertise, I can try out another animation with a character walking on his knees, but for now, a regular flop to the ground will have to do.
The 3rd week was called “Blocking +” which is pretty relative. The general idea is to take your blocked out animation and start adding overlapping motion, anticipations, overshoots…all that fancy stuff. Some people like to stay in stepped key mode as long as possible, others like to start going into spline and/or linear. Since I have difficulty transitioning from stepped to splined, I decided to take my keys out of stepped mode for this week to get as much time as possible to finesse it.
So there you have it! Process for Assignment 1 complete! Working on a slower movement made me miss snappier, faster timing…so next up I’ll be doing parkour for Assignment 2!
WOW … well done on the polish! O__O