Beginning Animation

Beginning Animation

My first animation has been done with the rig "Jin". I have loosely based the animation on her character design.

Terms and Conditions

- The 3D rigged models, Jin & Joe are protected by the copyright of On One Animation School. Commercial uses are prohibited.

- You may include the models for your personal demo reel.

- You may publish your animation using the models.

- You may use the models for an animation contest, as long as you provide credit of the models to On One Animation School.

- You may develop, modify or tweak the 3D models for your own creative work.

- You must not use the models for nudity, violence or any kind of illegal activities.

I started of with a walk cycle to get myself back into animation in Maya, I have done some animation during the summer but it was 2D in Photoshop.

This is a page of sketches I did before I started animating. I'm essentially trying to capture the essence of what I want to achieve in 3D.

Anyway, I started of with a simple walk cycle but I encountered a problem with the arm which is a recurring problem of mine during my animation years. I have produced a couple of playblasts from Maya to help show what the problem was.

Side View:

I deliberately took this from the side where you can't see the main problem, it can be misleading, I just have to remember to keep rotating the character from all angles. Everything seems to move to fast and too robotic.

Back View:

This is the broken bit...the problem is that between two frames I had no other frames for the shoulder (which is the problem here). I couldn't understand how it could go this wrong literally going from one frame to another. At first I played around with the graph editor but I didn't really have any luck with it but it was only when I revisited it later today that I was able to get a better understanding of what I was doing in the graph editor. I shifted some frames in the graph editor and quickly realized that my main problem was probably the interpolation ( I of course knew that this was the problem but I didn't know how)...I still don't know how it happened but I have learnt that if I am just careful in the future when animating with FK arms then I can make sure I stay ahead of the problems and quickly rectify them in the graph editor.

Last year in my animation projects I remember I ended up in the graph editor quite a lot to fix little niggles that cropped up in my animations. I anticipate the same thing will happen. I don't just want to be using the graph editor though to fix things, I would like to be actually using it to help me animate more cleanly in the first place. I believe this could be a crucial step in my skills set for 3D animation.

Final View:

This is my final walk, I simply took my normal walk and exaggerated it in the way I saw fit. Now I could probably spend a couple more hours on this as I can see some more potential in it but my main intention with this is to get across the general theme of the animations I want to produce. I started of, like I said, with a normal walk cycle but I quickly leaned towards exaggerating it and producing more of character.

I was interested in adding more expression to the character and focused more on making the sequence of frames blend well together with some bold keyframes standing out. I would like to get one of the key aspects (in my opinion) of animation to work in my 3D animation, strong poses. When working on this animation I very much had in mind strong poses with quick movement in between to emphasize the almost aggressive march of the character.

Someone did ask what action I was trying to animate and I couldn't give a clear answer. I would say it's the exaggerated march of a character who think they have power but perhaps have been given a power position of guarding to keep them out of the way.

I wasn't really focusing on the action but more the extreme poses which I guess didn't really match up in the end.

Summary:

This is a good start to my animating for the project, I have got in the mind set that I will be using the graph editor a lot to help improve my animations and make them cleaner. It has also given me further interests in exploring the 12 principles and how they could relate to my own work in 3D. Tomorrow I will read through some of John Lasseters SSIGRAPH papers on animating in 3D using 2D techniques and see if I can make any sense of them compared to my own work.

I have already been reading The Illusion of Life and I feel the 2D aspects of animation developed by Disney have seeped into my own 3D animation process.