This week’s training was to make a full set of body mechanics. The movement of a character is one of the most important things to demonstrate the level of the maker’s work, so when many animation and game companies are recruiting animators, they often need a showcase to showcase the level of the animator.
First I needed to find references, I went on youtube and checked out some mechnics animations, the more common ones being parkour, weightlifting, and synchronized gymnastics. I was more interested in the mechanics of gymnastics because it looked so elegant. In the end I settled on a gymnastics balance beam demonstration, simply because many other gymnastics body mechanics have been done by many people and I prefer to do something different to challenge myself. The reference I looked for was the balance beam gymnastics championship video from the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
After selecting the video reference I needed to select the character again and found a character in the character library that matched the b. Since it was a women’s gymnastics sport, I should have chosen a female character that matched the video. This isn’t a problem exactly, as the Incredibles’ mother can also extend her limbs in the animation, but in this section our character doesn’t need to do extensions and Spider-Man Gwen doesn’t have extensions, but we can still pose with fk.
After I thought it would be another simple movement if I could use fk to get the character’s swing as extreme as the previous times, I found out that I was wrong. Because the video I excerpted had two flips in the air and the hands would touch the plane, if I used fk, as the body torso rotates in the air, the arms have would rotate with the body as well, unlike the video where the hands steadily hold the ground and wait for the body to go over before releasing the hands.
The first is to overturn and redo the movement with ik, because the controller of ik is capable of not following the body’s movement, I have checked the relevant information, and indeed when doing grabbing and pushing, ik is undoubtedly much better than fk, or the second method, whenever making a grounded grab, attach the point on the palm of the hand to the plane The second method is to attach the point on the palm of the hand to the plane whenever a grounded grip is made, and then disconnect the grip when the hand is about to be released, but the body is moving in this way and the arm is swinging unnaturally when the grip is made, so I gave up the idea of the second method and had to redo it, but the length of the opening movement was not much, just a waste of production time, but in the production process of an animation company, time is money, so learn from this experience and you can take fewer detours in the future.
After that I followed the reference and adjusted my animated character step by step, but this week’s task was not to get the mechanics movements smoothly done in their entirety, but to get the blocking done before I did. What is blocking?
In an animation company’s animation process, character movement is often not done in one step, but in several steps.
The first step is to adjust the camera and character positions in Maya or other 3D production software, based on the storyboard that has been created. This is the 3D version of the storyboard, and we generally call this step layout.
The second step, on the basis of the layout to the character action for further debugging, equivalent to in two-dimensional animation, we need to add keyframes to the character, rather than frame by frame the action are drawn out, with the first step of the same reason is that this operation can have more modification of the space, and look at the overall effect, at the same time in the company process, to facilitate the animator to coordinate the operation of the process.
The third step is to refine the blocking animation, which is also equivalent to the complementary frame in 2D animation, called polish in the industry, to polish the character. Some people may wonder if the 3D software will not add intermediate frames on its own? Each animator will know from personal experience that an animation without adding detail to the frame count is very rudimentary and will have a lot of faulty movement.
The next steps are lighting effects and rendering and so on. Today I will focus on how to make a blocking animation, and in the next issue I will use the blog to study the process in detail. Next is a demonstration of my completed blocking animation.