Final Documentation

This entire semester has been focused on the animation and development of characters in motion. And for my final, I have chosen to take one of my original characters and make him move as fluidly as possible in different actions.

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At the beginning of this semester, I have been drawing several new characters in my sketchbook. Each of them were different from each other, from their wings to their eyes to their facial expressions. In addition to these new characters, I have also been drawing my first character from last class, Domino.

There were a few sketches that looked better than others, and all of them showed the characters in motion, or at least in different poses. However, while I have been giving a lot of attention to the newer characters, my own portrayal of Domino was lagging behind, especially when he's in motion.

I wanted to fix that, so I decided to make him the sole subject of my final project, which was an animation of him doing various actions; running, jumping, landing, and an idle pose.

The keyframes luckily were not as difficult as they used to be, since now I know well enough to always keep track of them and place them often. But weight painting was something I could not fathom on my own...lucky for me, my good friend Jen helped me out and made Domino look less like a rubber dog or some toy.

The most interesting things I animated were his ears, tail, and hat. Having them flop around in the air or wag as he turns his head was fun to animate, and it felt like I was really bringing the character to life.

The worst thing about animating Domino, or at least the most challenging thing besides weight painting, was one of his legs that moved in wide circles sometimes between keyframes. I fixed it by manipulating it directly over the course of the animation, but it was still strange to see.

All in all, I used a lot more time in this animation than my previous ones just to showcase different actions and try to put some spacing between them. All to help it flow better, which I really think it did.

A Weight Off My Shoulders

Thanks to Jen's help, the weighting for my model has been completed! From its fingers to its legs to its tail, it doesn't look like bent rubber anymore thank goodness.

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At this point, I want to make my walk cycle with it, or at least a few different actions like I planned to do. It all depends on how easy they come out I suppose. But if I can make multiple actions, I plan to have a walking motion, a running motion, a jump, a fall, and then maybe a landing animation before it loops. I might also throw in an idle animation in there as well.

Weighing the Odds

I've been trying to get my weight painting together, but it's been a lot more complicated than I thought. I tried just painting everything a color or taking all the color away and it just did different things to the body part, things I didn't want to happen in the first place.

Maybe I'm a perfectionist but my limbs always looked rubber and odd looking, so as I tweaked them they just got either a little bit better or a lot worse. The biggest mystery was why the back of the head moved when I adjusted the hat, or other oddities like that. I'll have to work harder on it to try and get those issues out of the way.

Storyboarding the Model

I've been going over what exactly to make of my final as far as movements go, since he's already fully equipped with a skeleton and the model's still in one piece.

I was hoping to have several poses or actions, such as running, jumping, landing, and perhaps a shocked expression. If not all that, a single walk cycle will be enough. Depends on how long I can work on it once the weight painting works out.

Creating More Models in 2D

Over the past week I found myself creating more 2D sketches of my characters in different poses, which not only helped me improve my drawing skills for my first character, but also helped me draw them with expressions in motion.

With my first character, Domino, I realized that how I drew him was weaker compared to the other 3 characters I developed, especially him in motion. I made him a priority this time and focused on how his body moves and acts, as well as updating the shape of his paws. I made them less glove like and more of individual fingers.

The frog character went mostly unchanged and I tried to keep with his specific feel. I was using the older pictures I did of the character as reference. Same goes for the ball-like character I created, even if he's the simplest of everyone with just eyes and a body.

The snake character though I think helped greatly now that I can create his wing hands easily and I can understand his body structure. His expressions show a lot, and I feel like he's coming along more as a character. Given the four of them, I have high hopes for them in the future, especially with Domino so I can made his walk cycle for the final.

Making a Walk Cycle

Taking one of the older models into Maya, specifically the basic model, I decided to take a shot at creating a walk cycle with a rigged character, and was as difficult as expected.

There were lots of different parts of the rig that I had to keyframe every time I moved it, but the best thing is that I didn't mess up and ruin the flow of what I was key framing by forgetting a moment to keyframe. I started with the legs and feet, which went pretty well as I moved the parts around.

Afterwards I moved the arms and torso, and finally the head to finish the animation. I feel that overall the head was the hardest thing to do because I never really notice how my head moves when I walk and how much it bobs up and down. Same with the back and the hips, since on my own I can't really feel anything moving.

Just Walk It Out

The last class we spent together was all about walking animations and characters walking. I was really surprised how difficult this was to do, since out loud it sounds really easy. I never really thought about the specifics of a walk cycle before.

I walked around in different ways to see how it felt, paying attention to how my arms and shoulders and other parts moved when I walked. It was really strange, because I never payed attention to it before.

For my animal character though, I payed more attention to how his tail and ears react when I walks. The tail itself is less floppy compared to a squirrels, casually moving itself back and forth as he walks. And his ears I figured out would behave much like long hair, moving depending on the speed he was going but probably bouncing lightly as he moved.