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I finished my 1st term at Animation Mentor!

For our last animation assignment, we had to animate a personality walk using the structured process we learned from creating the vanilla walk: plan, create main keys/breakdowns/extremes, polish. Following this workflow made things a LOT easier for me when dissecting the limp, a walk inspired from playing the recently released Left 4 Dead 2. 😉 I also chose this walk for educational reasons; I know I’m not the best at timing so I figured an uneven timing would help me sharpen my eye.

Since this is a 2 week assignment I thought I’d post it in a work in progress type post:

So first is the planning. Above is my planning for the limp based on several reference videos I took inside my apartment. I tried to find the contacts, passing positions, up and down extremes of the walk. Couple things I noticed:

• You spend most of your time on your good leg. When you do use your bad leg, you try to put as little weight and spend as little time on it as possible.
• For the above reason, your strides are going to be smaller.

There were a couple things that confused me though as I analyzed the limp and picked apart the key poses, especially for the bad leg. The good leg’s key poses were very prominent, save for the fact that the spacing for the good leg from passing to contact is huuuge since it’s trying to quickly move forward to catch all the weight.

Even though I had unanswered questions, I figured if I blocked it out and got some feedback from my peers and mentor, it’ll help clear the air. Below is what I submitted at the end of week 11:

[qt:https://www.liannecruz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/SUBMIT_injuredwalk_block.mov 480 360]

My mentor gave me some good notes. She said while the limp is readable (which was the main objective), she felt that Ballie spent too much time on the down positions and the good leg needed to spend more time in the up position, with the leg staying straight earlier in the animation. Straightened legs take the most weight and require less energy than a bent leg (try holding a squat position for a long period of time and I’m sure your legs will start to tremble). She then pointed out something that really helped me out: the bad leg’s contact and extreme downs should be combined into one pose. That was something I overlooked: that maybe the bad leg’s keys were actually combined. It explains why I had a hard time picking out its contacts.

With all those in mind, I reworked my blocking before I polished it. After some major timing changes and pose changes, here’s my revised blocking:

[qt:https://www.liannecruz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/SUBMIT_REVISE_limpblock.mov 480 360]

After that, splining! I always have a difficult time going from blocking to splining. I tend to lose the punchiness of my timing when I smooth out my animation…something I will keep working on as I continue these assignments. One way I’m trying to retain the timing is to have my blocking video open as I polish my animation in Maya. I compare the key poses in my blocking to my current work in progress polishing and make adjustments as needed. Then I force myself to adjust the surrounding frames of that key pose and make them accommodate any changes that I’ve made to retain as much of the timing “punch”. I try to smooth out the hips first, but I can’t help but look at the whole thing and get disgusted by it…so sometimes I’ll also adjust the foot positions while doing the hips (probably not the most logical method). It *is* important to look at the hips first, though, since that’s driving the way the legs catch the weight.

After I’m happy with the arcs, timing, and overall feel of the hips and feet, I go into fixing the knees. What’s nice about Ballie is that he has sphere knees which makes arc tracking for his knees a lot easier. It also helps diagnose IK pops when a leg overextends. The whole polishing process is lengthy and sometimes tedious, taking days to finish up before my 3pm Sunday deadline. I spend a lot of time comparing the spacing, especially, and making sure all the motion flows smoothly into each other without downplaying the timing. Each and every frame gets looked at as I scrub forwards and backwards along the animation. Even though the planning/blocking is the meat of the movement, I think every extra bit of time you invest in the polish will increase the “wow” factor of your animation.

Below is my ‘finished’ personality walk:

[qt:https://www.liannecruz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/SUBMIT_limp_walk.mov 480 360]

So there ya go: 2 weeks spent on slightly over 2 seconds. (Note the assignment requirement was 50-100 frames…so I barely made the minimum.) And of course, there’s still things I’d like to tweak.

My 3D Design professor from college (as in sculpture and tactile modeling, not CG) often discussed the work practices of many installation and sculpture artists and the obsessive nature that comes with perfecting their art. Any creative practice is dependent on the amount of time and effort invested by the artist, and the question my professor asked us that day is “when is it good enough?” What I hope is that every time I make something new, I keep pushing past my previous bar of “good enough” within the boundaries of the deadline given.

As you saw from my process for something as ‘simple’ as a walk cycle, there’s still a lot of experimentation and revision. I hardly ever get my work right the first time, and it’s unreasonable to think you should. Otherwise, you’d miss out on the fun part: the process.

Have a great holiday and good luck to all in the New Year!

I can’t believe we’re already halfway through the term! This week’s lesson was overlapping action, so we had to animate a pendulum with the block as the driving force. It was a fun assignment, and I got a lot of great feedback from my mentor. Unfortunately, all these quicktime videos I’m posting are before crit. One day when I get the time to work on the revisions, I’ll post ’em…but for now, you’ll have to put up with the raw form:

[qt:https://www.liannecruz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/SUBMIT_pendulum.mov 480 360]

Last Friday, AM hosted a Q & A session with animators from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend it. The animation style is fun and the humor is wonderfully silly. They discussed their workflow, visual references, and showed a couple deleted shots they worked on from the movie. They also showed pages from the Cloudy artbook which I now want to buy. One of their main points of reference for visual style were the old UPA cartoons back in the 1950’s: graphic, strong silhouettes, and flat colors. They explained how their tech helped them achieve that style in 3d which was incredibly interesting. Another thing I found interesting was that the animators were responsible for any cloth/prop that interacted with their characters; for example, the jello scene was hand keyed.

Since we are halfway through the term, I just wanted to go over things I’ve learned/need to work on:

• Timing and Spacing – I’m still in that rut where all my timing and spacing turns out even. I think it’s because of the way I block; I make all the poses first and then I start positioning the poses for the timing. The problem is I don’t do enough of part 2! I need to really exaggerate and push the timing so it’s clearly varied. Also, it’s better to make really exaggerated timing and ease it back than start out floaty all-around.
• Posing – Looking at real life and doing tons of sketches helps a lot…a lot. I still need to keep looking for that line of action, tho, and accentuate it.
• K.I.S.S. – As my friend, Jenny, would joke: “Remember to K.I.S.S!” It’s true and hard to do. I’m usually kicking myself on Friday night because I bit off more than I could chew. My mentor stresses ‘Simplicity and Clarity’, and even at the Cloudy Q and A, the animators said to look for 1 or 2 golden poses for your shot and not to have your shot stand out from the rest for film consistency’s sake. At AM, we’re given frame limits for each assignment (avg. around 120 frames/ 5 seconds) so you eventually learn you can’t cram in your epic good vs. evil bouncing ball story into an assignment. 😉 I also think since we’re all trying to make the animation interesting for ourselves, we tend to forget that this is called Foundations class for a reason. If you don’t demonstrate knowledge of each principle covered, then it doesn’t matter about the bells and whistles.
• Materials/Weight – It’s important to know what your objects are made of so you can animate the correct weight. Is it a light, airy ball or a heavy bowling ball? My pendulum received crits on this particular subject because the weight of the little ball looked both heavy and light throughout the assignment.
• Compromises – For me, there’s a lot to balance right now: a full-time (relatively new) job, school, long distance relationship, and family visitations. I can’t do everything. There will be days when coming home from work I’m drained, and sometimes I can’t see my loved ones as often as I’d like to. Going into this I knew what to expect, but in practice it’s a challenge juggling it. It’s going to be even harder with the holidays coming up, but I know next semester I will probably have to make some compromises.
• Time Management – And this leads into time management. I’m ashamed to say that I haven’t been the best at it lately. Luckily, there’s some really useful info online to keep me in line.

So onto the 2nd half of the semester, and hopefully with the lessons learned I will improve!