Advanced Body Mechanics - Shot 3

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In the third and final shot of Advanced Body Mechanics, I wanted the hero to fight back against the villain. My idea was for the character to retrieve a serum or potion from the suitcase that had fallen out of the jeep in the previous shot. Initially, I planned for the hero to use special gloves that granted superpowers, but I opted for a simpler approach that didn’t require additional modeling. The hero then flips the jeep over and executes a jumping back kick, sending it flying toward the villain. Finally, the jeep explodes when the hero shoots the gas tank.

 

Blocking - The blocking pass for this shot was more challenging than the first two. I decided to animate the arms and legs in IK for the entire shot, which made posing trickier—especially during the spin for the jump kick. Normally, I would animate arms in FK and switch legs to FK when they’re off the ground, as I did in shot 2. However, my mentor mentioned that he prefers animating arms and legs in IK most of the time. I found that approach interesting and wanted to experiment with it myself. It ended up being more challenging than I expected, but in hindsight, that makes sense—my mentor has much more experience with it than I do.

 

Splining - In this pass, I focused on adding more weight to the truck when Stewart lifts it by adjusting the timing and refining the arm poses. A significant amount of time in this stage was spent fine-tuning the timing, spacing, and posing to ensure the right balance of weight and speed. This was especially important for making the kick feel powerful enough.

 

Polished - Here, I continued refining the curves and adjusting the spacing of body parts. I realized that some poses, particularly with the torso during the bottle throw and car lift, were a bit too extreme. I’ll need to dial those back for a more natural feel.

 

Polish Plus - In the final pass, I focused on polishing the animation, refining spacing, and toning down some of the more extreme poses. I also adjusted the jeep animation to enhance its sense of weight. Overall, I’m very pleased with how the shot turned out—though, to be honest, it felt a bit shaky in the early stages. Animating the arms in IK took some time to get used to, but it helped me achieve clean arcs and make subtle adjustments more easily. I’m not sure if I’ll stick with this workflow long-term, but it’s valuable to understand its strengths. I can see it being especially useful in certain situations.

Advanced Body Mechanics - Shot 2

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In the next shot, I wanted to highlight the hero’s challenge and build tension leading up to the final shot. I decided on a long shot, with the villain in the distance gradually closing in. During this moment, he’ll be firing his weapon at the hero, adding intensity to the scene. This shot will also be more complex, requiring additional animation for elements like the missile and the suitcase flying out of the car.

 

Blocking - Overall, the timing feels solid. The main focus now is refining the posing and enhancing appeal. I need to ensure the line of action is clear and avoid over-animating.

 

Splining - At this stage, I focused heavily on the jump off and landing to enhance the illusion of weight. The poses started to feel stronger, but I also experimented with animating the arms in IK while he’s over the hood. Constantly readjusting the arms—and even the legs—every time I tweaked the torso was frustrating. In the next pass, I’ll work on refining the timing, making the movement snappier, and adjusting the floaty arm.

 

Polishing - In this pass, I added smear frames to the arms in the run cycle using lattice deformers to reduce flickering caused by the arm spacing. I also incorporated squash and stretch on the jump up—something I hadn’t really used in my Stewart animations until now. Additionally, I removed a few frames from the landing and the reach for the suitcase to make the movement feel snappier, which added more weight to the character.

Advanced Body Mechanics - Shot 1

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Okay here we go, Advanced Body Mechanics! My mentor for this course is Jeremey Lazares who has over 20 years of experience of animating. He currently works at Pixar as a senior animator. This course is structured a little different than the previous two courses that I have taken. In this course, we will be animating only 3 shots which can also be strung together as a sequence. We were given a few themes to choose from, but I decided to use my own which was based on an action/scifi movie theme. Each shot has to use at least 3 actions which were basically walking, running, jumping, climbing, or push/pull/throw an object.

Blocking - Based on the feedback I got, I needed to make the first action of getting up to be more dynamic. So I found some footage of someone doing a “Kip Up” move, which you see a lot in martial arts films. I also reshot some of my reference so that my starting pose blended better into the new move. From there, I just tried to nail some of the key poses from the reference video into my blocking pass. I realized that I aslo needed to extend my run a little bit since you can see me start slowing down in the reference. The character is suppose to continue running into the next shot.

 

Blocking Plus - Some things I worked on this pass were the poses on the “kip up” and in the run cycle. The run cycle needed some more work in timing and spacing as well to make it feel faster.

 

Spline/Polish - Overall, I’m happy with how this stage turned out. I really tried to focus on timing, spacing and the arcs. It still need some more polishing, however, with the transition from the hop to the run. It needs a smoother transition and progression into the sprint. On to Shot 2!