Unit 12
3D Animation
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Joy
Victory poses, or joy poses all posess the characteristic of stretching their arms out and covering as much area as possible, looking upwards also helps to re-enforce the feel of aiming high. The line of action will be a powerful straight or an arched back to again make the character take up as much space as possible.
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Despair
Poses showing sadness, or a loss are the complete opposite of victory poses, poses of despair aim to cover as little of an area as possible and therefore the line of action will always be arched forward. When crying you tend to blink a lot more and take longer blinks as if you're trying to hold back your tears, I made my character close his eyes as it's the best way to express pain in a still frame.
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Despair 2
I did a different take on the despair pose but this time wile walking. When you're sad you walk slower - taking smaller steps. The line of action is similar to the pose before but less extreme. The hands are very relaxed as the characters has no strength to walk upright, and his eye being covered shows that he doesn't want attention
Pocoyo's animation is incredibly snappy and theres almost no transition time between the poses. The walk/run cycle which in itself is really snappy, this is to make the animating process as easy and fast as possible so that they can regularly put out episodes. In most cases snappy animation that transitions to opposite line of actions is generally a good sign of animation but in this case it's pushed to the extreme where there are only poses and the computer does all the work in-between
Pocoyo
On the contrary of Pocoyo's snappy animation we have Noddy. Noddy uses the pose to pose technique as does Pocoyo, but instead of making snappy animation they extend the transition times between the poses creating a very flowy and amateur animation. To make sure I avoid this I will include frames of miscellaneous body movements and recoil movements from the main action performed. This will not only make the animation more interesting but it will also make the animation more human like.
Noddy
Head turn
Turning a head as a concept seems extremely easy, but to make it look realistic it's a whole other story. When humans turn a part of their body, their whole responds to that movement. In the case of the head turn, the shoulders move accordingly to the head then the body leans one one leg more. The hands also move either forward or backwards to accompany the shoulders. Humans don't simply turn their head on a single axis, they first tilt their head forward then tilt sidewards with the rotation of the head.
When you look around your eyes don't do smooth movements, they instead jump around with mostly blinking in between the jumps.
Object Pickup
Like Previously every small human action will cause many other body parts to respond. This was crucial to make the animation smooth and believable. In this animation I focused on creating the best line of action, and then instantly change to the opposite direction to make eye catching animation. The character stutters as he picks up the object to add a more believable weight and effort the character is going through.
Walk Cycle
When making a walking animation you want it to of course be smooth and believable, but also it must be seamless so that you can duplicate the action many times for longer walking sequences. In walk cycles it's important to keep the character centered and not moving position, this is much harder to do than to make the character move with the walk. This is extremely beneficial as you can simply move the character along to any location and the walk cycle will repeat without the need to animate complex walk animations.
Walk Cycle
My 11 second sound clip comes from the movie "Method man" made in 1971. The reason I chose that particular quote is because it can be portrayed in so many ways which is perfect for this unit. The best part is that the iconic one-liner can fit in an 11 second clip and make sense. The line takes place between 15 and 26 seconds in where the protagonist confronts the killer. In my animation I will have the killer be the protagonist as he will take up most of the screen.
Pre-render 1
Evaluation
The animation successfully portrays the 11 second clip in which it's clear who the characters are, their motives, and their current emotion. My animation has a healthy balance of snappy and flowing animations to make the movement more human-like. The absence of sound effects pose an additional challenge as sound amplifies your animation to make rapid and hits more impactful and noticeable. Animating the character in the foreground took a lot more work as robot-like movement is much more noticeable and so I had to spend more time tweaking smaller and less significant controllers than expected to make the character's movement believable. These controllers included the fingers, shoulders and torso disposition. Another challenge was that the elbows were incredibly hard to get right, this is because the elbows constantly respond to the hand movements through inverse kinematics. This makes the elbow hard to keep on the counter, not clipping through, and making sure it doesn't move too much sideways. To overcome this I had to adjust the upper body separately from the shoulders and arms which added a lot more work but that's exactly how you are able to move while keeping your hands on the counter. To save time animating the camera angle makes sure that the counter covers the character's legs so that I don't have to animate a very hard walk cycle and instead I only need to swing the hips and move the character up and down. The walk still looks like he floats towards the counter as the character's movements is a smooth curve and a dynamic slow down rather than a fast acceleration and a constant speed in a straight line.
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