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. 😉
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When watching Kiki’s Delivery Service awhile back, I fell in love with this one part near the end of the movie where Kiki is running and as she turns the corner, she slips on a leaf and stumbles before regaining her footing. It’s such a small detail, but it makes such a difference.
Watching this along with seeing stuff in Drake’s Fortune inspired me to try doing a bit of physical animation where my character will run, stumble a bit, pick up his footing, then jump and scramble up the side of the wall. Above are reference thumbnails taken from Kiki and from a parkour video I saw on Youtube. The jump thumbnails read right to left because it was easier for reading the movement based on the reference footage.
Here’s the finished product. Of course, I’ll probably keep tweaking. Any crits are welcome!
I learned a lot doing this animation test, particularly about workflow and using the Max rig by Peter Starostin. Animating strictly with IK hands was an interesting challenge, but it does make things easier if you want to visualize arcs and adjust torso movement without affecting the hand positions. I’m not quite sure if I’d use it for a walk cycle, but for acting it does have its merits.
Anyway, I’m off to start my next animation which will be a physical test using my character, Asher. I’ll put up the planning/blocking as I go.
Added more smoothing to the rest of the clip. There’s still some rough spots, but I intend on going through them as I start adding facial and finger movement this upcoming week. I tried to follow the crits from last post; lemme know if I’m on the right track. Thanks again for all the advice!
Started polishing the body this week. I’ll be out on vacation all of next week, but when I get back I’ll post more as I go along. I’ve made changes for the pose where he pauses and tried to bring out his silhouette more as per your generous suggestions.
I’m finding that splining is pretty time consuming; it’s teaching me a great deal about patience. One of my fears is that I’ll lose the poses and timing as I smooth everything out. Please let me know if I do…or if you see anything that sticks out to you. Thanks!
Now that I have more time to do personal stuff, I wanted to start by doing a one character dialogue test. What I wanted to get out of this is learning a new workflow, try out some new techniques, and of course, keep on improving. 😉 I tend to burden myself with other parts of the creation process (modeling, rigging, etc.) and while it’s good to have knowledge of rigging, I should really focus on animating.
I started out by looking for some interesting dialogue from The Daily .Wav. I found a clip from “It’s a Wonderful Life”, which I admit I’ve never seen in its entirety (my boyfriend totally chewed me out about this.) I really love the volatile tone of voice in the clip and thought it’d be fun to try something with such intensity. Afterwards, I shot some reference and did some planning:
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I tried to mimic the blocked/stepped approach to animating in 3D where you set a key on every controller on every keyframe you make. To facilitate this in 3dsMax, I changed the option of “Default In/Out Tangents for New Keys” to stepped. You can find it right below the timeline on the main UI. I also used the “Key Mode Toggle” (which is that pair of arrows next to the right of “Key Filters”) when I needed to jump from pose to pose with my arrow keys.
Working in this fashion so far, I have to say it’s a lot nicer than the PC distracting you with its ‘tweening. It also made me more conscious of posing, which is one of the major things I want to work on within animation. To keep myself in check, I followed Victor Navone’s advice and made sure there was a key at least every 4 frames. Another source of inspiration was looking at Brandon Beckstead’s tightly blocked work.
I’m still a beginner at this, so if you have any crits on the poses or timing, lemme know! I’m focusing more on the body right now; though if you have any suggestions for the eyes, that’d be great to hear too. I’m really enjoying this workflow, and hopefully with more practice it’ll come more naturally. 🙂
I’m currently modeling a character from my Songcatcher game concept from back in college. Songcatcher is a rhythm-based/RPG style game that follows Asher and his adventures in music school. Asher is a typical easygoing guy who wishes to become an string instrument maker. His main ‘weapon’ of choice is the cello, which he keeps strapped to his back while traveling. He comes from an island nation, and attends school on the mainland. I’ll include more details later about Asher and his world in this blog.
For now, here are some WIP shots of the model of Asher. I originally wanted him to be more realistically proportioned, but then felt that a more stylized, cartoonier proportion was more appropriate and would mesh better with what I have planned art direction and animation-wise. I’m in the process of UV’ing the model, then I’ll texture, rig, and then start animating my heart out. 😀
Any crits or comments are greatly appreciated!
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