To give myself a base to work from i decided the first thing to do would be to set about working on the scouts positioning and camera shots, i would do this on a page by page basis, with one page being six windows on my storyboard. At this point the only animation done with the scout model would be movement and rotation, no animation to the actual body of the model.
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| The green box in the top-right window lets me see the area that will be rendered. |
Having set up all the camera angles (making sure to name each one as in one case there are several in close proximity) and basic movement for the first storyboard page i set about creating a detailed animation set for them, beginning with the first scene which sees the scout walking down the street.
I decided to focus on the legs first:
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| Starting Pose. I tried to capture a 'cocky strut' pose. Don't think i pulled it off at this point... |
This movement required me to maneuver not only the foot controls, but also the main hip control around the waist, so that the upper body followed the movement of the legs.
Right away i noticed a problem: the starting position was in shot of the camera (below) when i wanted it to begin clear, with the scout walking in from the right.
To fix this i offset the keyframes of the model so that they came about later in the animation, in addition i added keyframes that placed the model out-of-shot at the first frame. Effectively all i did here was add another step.
Next up i focussed on hip movement, something that seems to be a common oversight among beginner animators. But while i had remembered their importance in creating a convincing walk cycle, i had difficulty getting timing right. Eventually however, after some experimentation with the keyframe timings i had something i was happy with.
Shoulders. Another subtle part of the walk cycle, i added some slight forward and backward movement, with some vertical to-and-fro in their as well. A subtle but effective part of portraying the 'strut'.
Next up: the arms. I started at the shoulder by creating animations for the swing of the arm as a whole, before moving on to the elbows, which added the essential 'swing' to that cocky strut i was aiming for.
Doing this was not as easy a task as i'd hoped, i found that the keyframes i had initially made for the elbows were too jerky, so i made adjustments to give them a smoother flow. Then I decided that the elbow animations were completely mis-timed. thankfully, a simple shift-back of the keyframes by 6 frames fixed this.
Next, i noticed that there was no vertical movement to the arm-swing, so i added lateral movement to the shoulders to make the whole swing seem that much more cocky.
At this point i decided i was making good progress but that the walk cycle was too quick so spending even more time to this first animation i went back and adjusted all of the keyframes so that rather than walking on 12's (one foot down every 12 frames), the scout would walk on 16's.
Common sense dictated that I not make all the changes at once so i decided to adjust just the leg keyframes first of all, with the assumption that this may lead me to the need to adjust the entire models forward movement keyframes to compensate. To do this was fairly simple, it was just the number of different keyframes that i would have to move that would be time-consuming, all i had to do was shift click the sequence and drag it so that the beginning keyframe is at the time you wish it to be.
Having done this i decided it gave a much more relaxed pace to the walk cycle, aiding the conveyance of an arrogant strut. So i decided to stick with it and go ahead and adjust the rest of the keyframes. I worked my way from the bottom of the model up, checking for keyframes and adjusting where necessary, this process lead me to the thought that some way to keep track of the parts of the model i had animated would be very handy be it something built into the program or me just making note of these parts as i go along.
As you can see the walk cycle is far from being finished, but it certainly shows how much the slower walk cycle does to remove the 'urgency' of the gait i originally gave the scout. Admittedly the animation was still lacking something very important, so i addressed that next:
Adding vertical movement to the feet turns the animation from an odd looking shuffle into a semi-decent looking walk cycle.
At this point i noticed noticed rigidity of the walk when viewing it from the side, so i decided to add some up and down movement to the upper body control, in keeping with the arc theory. I really felt this subtle change made a huge difference to the animation.
My happiness was cut a bit short when i realised that for some reason the feet were diverging in opposite directions along the x-axis, essentially forcing the scout into an eventual split-like pose. Deleting the x-axis keyframes for the feet had no effect, so i decided all i could do was to try and tame this bizarre unprovoked movement by adding new x-axis keyframes.
At this point i decided it was time to make use of some of the features that make this model so great in my eyes: its controls.
As you can see above there are a number of adjustments that can be made just to the foot of this model, though in this case i only made use of 'toe roll' which pitches the foot forward on its toes,but most importantly, they meant i didn't have to do any rotating of the ankles myself. The downside to this, or so i thought, was that there was no easy way to adjust the keyframes but that proved not to be the case as the controls all had their own curve in the curve editor.
In the above video you can see the difference using the foot control functions makes to the animation. Admittedly achieving such an effect would be possible without the use of controls, however their incredible ease of use is the deciding factor here, it simplifies the animation process for this model a very great deal.
On a whim i decided to try the idea of offsetting, in this case it was the mid-arms which i felt didn't look right. I offset the animation by 4 frames (forward), creating a much more natural looking swing.
I then moved on to the scouts bag, adding some subtle 'swinging' movements to it. Whilst doing this i noticed the bat which currently had no place in the animation. Originally i had intended to have the scout carrying the bat in one hand, but instead opted to position the bat as if it was sticking out of the scouts bag, and make it a child of the bag control so it would inherit its movement.
Being relatively happy with everything i moved onto that subtle secondary animation piece: the face. I wanted to give a facial expression that matched the scouts confident strut without looking over-the-top.
At this point, whilst looking through the camera through which i intended to render the animation, i noticed that the heel movement was very rigid, almost too sudden. I fixed this by smoothing the animation curves, this simply involved me making the heel take longer to rise.
At this point i had reached a point that i was happy with! However, sadly, this is where my animation ends...
Due to severe time constraints and working on other modules I've managed to leave myself without enough time to animate any more than what i have already created. Despite this i hope that what i have created effectively demonstrates the quality that i aimed to achieve for the entire animation.
Here you can see production renders of the two shots i was shooting for, as well as a full body shot to show the animation in detail.
[1] This shot turned out exactly how i hoped it would, though it does look a little too precise in it's positioning, a very minor shift upward and with a small amount of rotation would most likely have solved this.
[2] The lighting on this animation seems to be a bit off for some reason, there could have been something amiss with the cameras settings but i have no recollection of changing them.
[3] Here you can see the walk animation in full view, i am very very happy with how it looks, especially when rendered to such a high quality.
To render the animations i had to use an image collaboration technique i'd learnt in another module; this was because using mental ray as the renderer meant i had no option to render directly to a video file. I opened the images using Adobes Lightroom program then, using a downloaded preset intended for time-lapse videos, created a 24fps video of them.
The animation process:That is how i intended to go about creating my animation, and i had really high hopes, but in the end i just didn't have nearly enough time, the complexity of this model and my own perfectionism worked against me during this time, but even so i thoroughly enjoyed it.
I thought it would be worth mentioning the process i used to create this small section of my animation, as it is how i intended to approach the animation as a whole.
- Camera Angles and Character Positioning
The first thing i did, as mentioned at the beginning of the post, is to set up the camera angles, along with basic character positioning. This allows me to set up the scene for the second part of my process.
- Basic Character Movement
In this part i 'block out' the basic movements of the animation, creating a draft, as it were.
- Increasing Levels of Detail
This is a repeat process whereby i simply expand the blocked out animations to progressively higher qualities until i am happy with the results.
[BONUS CONTENT]:
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