This semester was focused on animating characters to make it production ready for films and games. Here's my detailed blog on how I animated my characters while keeping 12 principles of animation in mind.
Character animation is mainly based on 12 principles of animation. They are :
Squash and stretch
Anticipation
Staging
Straight ahead action and pose to pose
Follow through and overlapping action
Slow in and slow out
Arc
Secondary action
Timing
Exaggeration
Solid drawing
Appeal
For the final assignments we had to make 3 animation videos in which we were tasked to cover all the animation principles and use it to make animation on body mechanics and acial animation. Those 3 videos are :
Walk Cycle
Lip Sync Animation
Game Play Pack
Walk Cycle
For walk cycle we were asked to include a personality in our walk and I tried to research about different types of walks for my character. The video from which I took reference from is "16 walk cycles - Different Attitudes" The walk which I finalised was double bounce walk cycle. To get more detailed reference I shot the video of me trying to walk in the same manner. For selecting the rig I already had Aisha Rig by an artist named Sagar Arun on my mind because of I have already worked on that rig before and the controls are fairly easy to navigate. On top of that the rig has slippers which had it's own controllers and I thought it would add an extra edge to the character and give her more personality. To start animating there are 3 most important steps which should be followed in a correct order. They are :
Blockout
Blockout plus or inbetweens
Spline
These are the main poses for my walk in which first and last pose are the same and the middle poses is the mirror of the first pose. In these poses the legs are in contact with the floor in which forward leg is on its heel and the other leg is on its fingers. I wanted to show her happy so I added the sway to her hips and face.
For in-betweens next pose is down pose in which I moved the whole body down and the pose after that is the passing pose. Next one is down pose as well. Generally, in a normal walk cycle this pose is up pose but this is a bounce walk I added another down to give a little bounce in her walk. The rule is to add either two downs or two ups instead of just one.
Next step was polishing the animation by going into the graph editor and make the curves smooth in spline. For example, applying auto tangents where there is a curve between two keys which are at the same position to make the animation bit more smoother.
After that I added hip rotation and little bit swaying of hands and head as well. To make it more realistic I added overlapping actions of her hair moving sideways with her head. To give her depth in personality I added headphones and added constraints and parented it with the head so that it moves with the head.
Facial Performance
For the 2nd assignment we were given an option of either doing facial lip sync performance or do an attack combo. I have always wanted to learn doing facial animation and play around with different facial features to give it a believable acting performance so I chose for that option. Next task was trying to find a good reference for the animation so I turned towards my favourite sitcoms for inspirations. I finalised a scene from Modern Family acted by Cameron Tucker in which he was being dramatic and was talking about his sister. Although I did have a ready reference I wanted to shoot my own so I tried acting and after almost 35-40 takes I reached somewhere near being dramatic and exaggerated enough to use it as my reference.
The next step was to convert this reference into images and import as an image plane. After that I started blocking out the animation but here I forgot to mark the frames for key poses and in betweens and extremes as a result I went into flow and tried to animate it without breaking down the poses which made a lot of mess. I learned from my mistake and then imported the video into syncsketch to annotate and mark down different poses frame by frame.
Then I started to set up the key poses including the expressions and hands along with the lipsync to get the overall basic flow of the animations. Blocking out for facial took the most time as I had to block out the mouth shapes as well which would make the inbetweens and spline stage easier.
After blocking out I sent the file to Johana for review and she sent me some pointers on which I needed to do more work.
After adding in betweens and converting the curves from stepped to spline I realised there were lots of jerks in between because I had lots of keys and in some places, it was not needed so I focused from the start and worked on 30 frames at a time. One mistake I did while animating was not changing between IK and FK as my character was placing her hands on a table after adding the environment to the scene. The environment I imported was diner set and was taken from anim_matt.
So I deleted all the keys where the hands stay on the table and enabled the IK and adjusted the hands for that whole section and keyed at the end of IK. After that I enabled the FK to carry out the remaining animation. I did the same thing with other hand as well.
Overall, after deleting many keys and reassigning some more keys my animation became much smoother than before.
Game Play Pack
For our 3rd and final submissions, we were given another option of choosing between narrative story or game play pack in which there should be 4 different types of animations. They are:
Idle Animation
Walk Cycle
Run Cycle
Jump or Dive or Dash
I chose for the game play pack because I wanted to focus on body mechanics as well and balance out the animation videos and include something of game as well.
The rig I used here was rocket girl rig provided by our professor. I wanted to use a woman warrior rig so I tested couple of rigs but wasn't satisfied with the capacity of their controllers. That's why I chose Rocket rig whose navigation felt fairly simple.
For idle animation the reference I took from was genshin impact game of a character named Lisa. I added very subtle hand movements and breathing movements. For breathing I rotated the chest controller and translated the shoulders to give it the illusion of breathing.
I animated a very basic walk and run cycle taking the reference from animator's survival kit. For jump I didn't have enough room and flexibility to do the high jump. By doing so my rig was breaking a lot so I asked my professor if I could use different rig for this as I had already done all three animations by then. After getting his approval I used female rig of NC11.
The reference for jump was taken from a youtube video "Jump Reference" by James Brent.
All in all, I had fun and enjoyed a lot while animating game play pack.
For render we were asked to get the playblast of all the animations. There are some rules which we have to follow while taking out the payblast.
The image size should be HD_1080 from render settings
Only Polygons should be visible in the camera frame
Turn on multi Anti alisasing and increase the sample count to 16
Apply shadows if necessary
Self Critique
One of the main things which I struggled a lot while animating was not taking care of blockout and trying to animate the whole thing in one go. I learned it the hard way after animating both the walk cycle and lipsync twice after scraping everything I did so far.
Another thing was struggling with applying a lot of keys and some where even right next to each other because of which my animations were became really jerky even after applying spline.
It was so much fun while animating these videos and learned a lot while doing so. I look forward to challenge my abilities further more and make more animations.
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