Category: Animation

This is my submission for Term 1.

Design Proposal Submission

This week, I took my blockout animation a step further by converting it to spline. My main focus was on creating smooth arcs in the character’s movement to make the animation feel more natural and dynamic.

While working on this, I faced a few challenges. The character seemed to drift too far to the right while in the air, which threw off the balance of the jump. The exaggeration at the start of the motion didn’t look right either—it felt unnatural and distracted from the overall flow. On top of that, the character stayed in the air for too long, making the jump feel unrealistic.

To fix these issues, I concentrated on refining the motion path and adjusting the character’s poses frame by frame. It took some patience, but these tweaks started to bring the animation closer to what I had envisioned.

This process reminded me how important it is to focus on details like timing and arcs to make animations look believable. It’s been a challenging but rewarding experience, and I’m excited to see how much further I can push this animation.

This week, I worked on blockout animation of the character jumping. I struggled with a few things, like getting the character’s position right during the jump. The landing didn’t look natural either, and the timing between the start of the jump and reaching the peak felt slow.

To fix this, I focused on the motion path of the jump and adjusted the landing poses to make the weight shift more realistic. I also sped up the frames between the takeoff and peak to give the jump more energy.

It took some trial and error, but I learned a lot about timing, weight, and motion arcs.

This week we were told to find references for our body mechanics assignment and make a plan on animating them. We were given different options from which I selected “Jumping from a ledge”. After deciding the animation which I want to do I started looking for references on Youtube. For my animation I was looking for parkour references and jumps like Spiderman and Miles Morales. It was then when I came across a Youtuber named ‘Hero DW’ and I then I saw one of his video where he had done a backflip jump from a high ground and i selected that for my animation.

So, after I found the reference for my animation I started with my planning and drawing a 2D test animation to check if i got the timing right or not.

This week I got the feedback on my walk cycle spline animation and had to make some changes to make the walk look better, like making the the heel bend a little more and avoiding knee pop.

Working on my spline animation I noticed a few problems like the feet were going inside the ground plane and there was some knee pop and my walker. I tried to fix everything in the graph editor and tried creating curves in the feet and body movement using the animation curve tool. After a short while I was able to fix most of the issues in my spline animation.

This week George told us that there are 4 main key poses for the walk cycle animation which are:-

1. Contact Pose
2. Down Pose
3. Passing Pose
4. Up Pose

By understanding these basic poses, we started to do a walk cycle of 24 frames by creating a foundation in the keyframes by blocking these poses. The contact poses went at 0, 12 and 24 and the others were distributed evenly between these frames.

Again for this assignment I referenced the walker into my scene and started keyframing the contact poses. For the down pose, passing pose and up pose I keyframed them evenly with 3 frames between each. After getting that down it was easy to replicate the next 24 frames with the help of the initial ones, I just needed to change the values and make some changes in the graph editor and with that I have a 48 frames walk cycle ready. After completing the walk, I added some rotation to the ball so that the walk feels more realistic and the weight shift to be visible.

I got feedback on my walk cycle blockout animation and I got some changes to make and after the critique session we went ahead with the lecture and George told us that our next assignment will be to convert the blockout of walk cycle into spline.

This week I have converted the blockout animation into spline after making changes in my blockout animation. The changes which George told me do in my blockout helped me a lot during my spline as I did not get any major issues in my spline animation when i converted it from blockout.

When I first converted the animation from blockout to spline I faced some challenges like the feet placement was not accurate and there was not enough movement in the heel part but those were just minor issues which I was able to fix in a short amount of time. After fixing these in the graph editor and cleaning the graph editor a little I was some what close to achieving the smooth transition between key poses and the realistic weight shift feel.

We proceeded with our Maya work, establishing our projects and referencing the “Walker” model in my file. We started by making a selection set of the primary controls required for key framing and adding it to the animation tab’s shelf.Our main aim this week was to focus solely on the blocking phase. We began by designing our positions and creating our own reference video. My reference video was a simple stance in which the character steps from left to right. For the first frame, I posed the Walker leaning on its left hip to better see how the weight transfers left before moving right, and then again during the step. I utilized this approach to animate the weight shift.

We set the foot brake value to 100 and changed the foot roll and heel roll parameters to perfect the Walker’s position as needed.

At first, I mostly struggled with the positioning of the Walker, as it was leaning too much on one side. However, by studying my reference footage and receiving criticism from George on my blocking, I was able to improve the stance. After the critiques we were told to change our blocking to splines the next week.

Additionally, we had to design three positions based on inspiration from the internet or our designs. We were told to utilized the “Ultimate Bony” rigged character for this. To provide variation, I made a sword swinging pose, dance pose, and a pose of two characters attacking. I learned how to position a char
acter by following and analyzing the line of action correctly.

By creating the poses I got to learn about how joints in an actual human body works and how to balance a character properly by distributing the weight equally on both sides so that it does not feels like the character is falling.

This week, we continued our work on the Ball with Tail animation, picking up from where we left off last week, and learned how to convert the Block Out animation into Spline animation. We began with a critique session, where everyone received feedback on their Block Out animations, which helped me identify the adjustments needed to improve my work.

After the critique, we resumed our previous progress and I learned how to convert Block Out animations into Spline. Following the conversion, we proceeded to the Graph Editor to refine the animation and correct the ball’s path using the Motion Trail feature. We made slight adjustments to the ball’s trajectory to enhance the realism of the jump. Next, we fine-tuned the Translate Y graph in the Graph Editor to incorporate ease-in and ease-out effects for the jump.

For the tail animation, we made minor adjustments in the Graph Editor to smooth out the movement. Additionally, we discussed keyframe management and learned how to delete unnecessary keyframes at the end of the animation process to maintain a cleaner and more organized Graph Editor.

This week, I adhered to the planning I developed during the previous week and converted my Block Out animation into Spline. I utilized the Graph Editor to add ease-in and ease-out effects and used the Motion Trail to improve the bounce distance and trajectory of the ball and made several additional adjustments to make the ball with tail animation look more natural.

In week 3, we delved deeper into Anticipation, which is one of the 12 Principles of Animation. I got to learn that it is essential to recognize that all movement is generated by forces, whether external or internal and Anticipation serves as the most natural method for building internal force to facilitate dynamic motion. We were told that “An object in motion will remain in motion unless acted on by an unbalanced force.”

We were advised to master the rules before attempting to deviate from them, as it is crucial at this early stage of our animation journey to establish a solid foundation before advancing further.

For the ball with tail animation, we were encouraged to watch videos of squirrels to observe how their tails react during movement and jumping. We closely observed the natural movement of the tail and how it follows a curve naturally towards the direction the squirrel goes in. This gave us a clear idea of how to go ahead with the movement of the tail in respect to the curve. We were advised to concentrate on the ball first, focusing on its bounce, squash, and stretch, before animating the tail. In this task, we were instructed to work in Block Out rather than Spline, achieving the forward bounce along with the tail movement using the Block Out method before converting it to Spline.

For this task I planned my initial steps in 2D and then started to animate it in Maya with that reference. The block out method helped us to fixate the positions initially to set the ball in motion. Although it looked a little jerky at first, I set a few more keyframes to make the movement look a little cohesive. Once the ball was set, I moved on to the tail. At the first keyframe, I shaped the tail like I wanted it as an initial position. As I moved forward, I kept on rotating the tail in a ‘S’ curve just like I had observed in the aforementioned video. By setting a keyframe and blocking the tail at every jump, I tried to make it look natural.

After setting all the keyframes, it looked pretty decent as an initial step towards the final animation. This made me all set for the upcoming week where we will learn how to convert it into spline and make it look way smoother than blocking.