Animations

  • Mon Mar 02 2020 06:43:55 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)
  • Art Mastery

This is harder than it looks
Time spent 12 hours
Total Time 282 hours
Remaining 9718 hours
2.82% Towards Mastery!

Learning animation fundamentals, and doing a terrible run cycle. Learning a lot but and I'm getting faster, but it's still a slow process for me right now. Unfortunately the rigt I'm using (Rigify comes with blender) isn't compatible with Unity/Mechanim, but I really wanted some practical experience with it before I returned to my own rigging tools to get a feel for what controls are useful, what a good flow is like, and what improvements or adjustments I'd like to make to my own rigs.

Oh yeah! Overlapping motion right?

The quality here is pretty poor, but it is significant progress from where I started this morning. It was fun for me to try and hit all 12 fundamentals of animations,

  • Squash and stretch? Okay yeah. As in, I squashed and stretched. Just maybe not in good places. LOOKIT THAT MONKEY ARM!
  • Anticipation? Sorta, maybe?
  • Staging? Noooope.
  • I did this pose to pose not straight ahead but I did try and straight ahead some overlapping action, but I need to clean it up obviously.
  • Follow through and overlapping action? Some places, I got lazy and I think there's a lot more I could do here.
  • Slow in and slow out? I tried, but I didn't smooth it enough in the curves editor making it look pretty jerky.
  • Arc? This is one that I tried really hard but without spending more time in the curves editor, you can tell I have a series of hand placed keyframes rather than an effectively tweened and motion pathed animation. More work to do here for sure!
  • Secondary action? This one I didn't spend as much time on as I should've. I basically just blocked the animation out and haven't added any of the subtle detail that really sells this as a completed animation.
  • Timing? Is horrible in this piece! One of the worst aspects by far.
  • Exaggeration? I tried to add this with squash and stretch on the impact frames but I think a combination of bad keyframes and bad timing loses all of it.
  • Solid drawing? Model is trash.
  • Appeal? Probably only to me =D but I'm proud! Don't tell my animator buddies, I think they'd lose all respect for me if they saw me happy about something like this.

Just to give you an idea, here's my first attempt at a run cycle about 8 hours ago:

WHADDYA MEAN THE CONTACT POINT ISN'T THE PIVOT! WHAAAAT?!

This was really helpful, and it clarified a lot of what I was wondering about in relations to my own rig. Hopefully, I'll have more on that soon!

No excuses... but the low framerate gif makes it EXTRA jerky, You can see on frame 90, for example, a big gif pop and generally unevenly spaced frames.