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.