ANI174 - Week 12

What? So What? Now What?

This week I did my second pass for my animation. I spent almost all my time in the graph editor as I prefer using that much more than editing keyframes with the timeline.

I did some cleanup getting rid of unnecessary keyframes created during the blocking pass and then started moving keyframes per axis for each controller one by one. To reduce the floaty motion of the animation I started duplicating keyframes to hold poses for longer but I also offset them very slightly so that the movement had some variation to make it appear more natural.

Some of the feedback I got last week on my first pass was on the position of the feet so I had another look at it and decided it did look a little to awkward and unnatural when she kicks her feet forward as she also leans forward when she yells "Wait!" What I did instead, was bring her feet towards the seat so that they complement the movement of leaning forward and shifting of body weight.

The arms needed a lot of work to get right, and I also started to suffer from some gimbal lock at one point but after enough fiddling around I managed to fix it.

During this second pass I mostly focused on getting the movement of the arms, body and head. On the next pass I want to focus a bit on the facial expressions to add some extra emphasis where needed and I will also add some animation to the tail which I haven't touched at all yet. The fingers also clip through the table at one point and I will need to do some cleanup and fine-tuning on them as well.

During class we did a lip-sync exercise where we animated our character rigs to a sound clip from the movie Forest Gump. I did a very quick blocking pass on the mouth then one refining pass. Once I was happy with the movement of the mouth I did some really fast and rough animation for the head, eyes, eyebrows and shoulders. By the end of class I managed to get a pretty decent end result that I was happy with considering it was only 4 hours of work.