Back in the summer, I started the 3D character animation program at Animation Mentor. Now, I want to start documenting my progress through the program in a more step-by-step way rather than just showing my end-of-course reels. Having already taken the first course, Animation Basics, I will start blogging with the second course, Body Mechanics. I am already a few months into the program, so most of the stuff I will be writing about the exercises will be based on what I can remember, but hopefully, I can articulate what I was thinking in my workflow.

Below are the planning sketches I drew up. Basically, it's a simple side step while also trying to include some arcs and overlapping action with the arms and head.

Here is my reference video. After shooting this in my backyard, I realized that I didn’t really do anything with the upper body, so I’m not getting very good reference for that. This will show in my blocking pass because I’m basically making things up. That’s not good! I should have re-shot my reference video.

Blocking Stage

As you can see in the videos below, I had to animate the head and arms without any usable data from the reference video. For the most part, I think I was able to manually pose the work, but my mentor, Keith Sintay, really emphasized the importance of getting the weight and balance correct, so the video data would have been helpful for that.

Blocking Front View

Blocking Side View

Spline Stage

My first pass at splining didn’t go as well as I had hoped. I felt the overall movement was slow, so I sped up the animation a little too much, and it lost some of its weight. Also, the ending, where he wiggles from the waist, is very bad. I learned a very important lesson here: make the video reference look as close to the final animation as possible. The more data you can pull from it, the better.

Spline Front View

Spline Side View

Tiedown Stage

In this stage, I went back to the original timing and adjusted the settle at the end to focus more on the top of the body with the head. The right leg still feels a bit floaty on the plant to me. The balance in the side view could also use an extra pass.