Body Mechanics - Exercise 4 Physicality with Weight

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The final assignment in Body Mechanics was to animate pulling or pushing an object with weight. We had the choice of deciding what that heavy object would be so I decided to use a sword. As a big fan of the Sword in the Stone and the great animator, Milt Kahl, I knew that this exercise would really challenge me on every level.

Sketch planning

In the first pass, I grab the key poses from the video reference. A sense of weight in the sword is still kind of missing though in the playback so I had to address that in the next pass.

In the second pass, the arc and spacing of the sword needs some more polish

In the second spline pass, the weight in the sword is finally feeling better. The head thrust in the beginning, though, is feeling like he is slamming his face into a wall.

In the final spline pass, I tried to tone down the head motion in the beginning and give more of an arc motion.

The final animation. Overall, I’m happy with how it came it out, but are still some things that I would like to tweak. For example, the hands reaction to the pull up on the sword got lost at some point. I would love to add that back in.

Body Mechanics - Exercise 3 Physicality with Locomotion

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This assignment combined locomotion (walking) with a physical action—getting up from a seated position or sitting down. I was attending a conference during this assignment, so my video reference wasn’t shot very well in my hotel room. This is another example of how I wish I had spent more time capturing better reference footage, such as finding a more open space to shoot in and using my wife as the subject, since I was using the Stella rig. These kinds of improvements could have helped enhance the animation. In my planning thumbnails, I began marking where I observed translations and rotations of body parts, as well as where certain principles of animation, like anticipation, would come into play

As you can see in the first pass, the “personality” of the character isn’t quite right. Obviously, this required some adjustments be made.

So I decreased the spacing between the feet and swing the hands out a little more to portray a more feminine walk.

I add more drag in the head and weight in the body as it transitions from sitting to standing.

I continue to focus on the weight, timing and spacing. I also decide to hide the ponytails because I didn’t have enough time to animate them well enough to show.

The final animation.

Body Mechanics - Exercise 2 Full Body Walk

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This exercise was pretty straightforward, especially since I had just completed a lower-body vanilla walk cycle in the previous class, Animation Basics. I’ve also done plenty of walk cycles as a 2D animator, which feels like a long time ago now.

For this walk cycle, I wanted to challenge myself as an animator by using the female rig, Stella. I don’t have much experience animating female characters (the last time being my thesis video), so I knew this would be a great opportunity to test myself. I started with a reference video, but looking back, I probably should have filmed my wife walking to get a better reference.

As I progress through this program at Animation Mentor, I’m really starting to appreciate just how important it is to have good reference video. By "good," I mean reference that closely matches what I’m animating. Trying to make up animation without a clear picture in your mind of what’s happening in a scene can be really frustrating.

Normal Walkcycle Planning Sketc

Blocking Pass

I focused on the outward swinging of the arms and the hip rotation, as these are elements that can distinguish a female walk from a male walk. Some areas I needed to work on were creating more “organic” hand poses, reducing the back-and-forward translation of the torso in the side view, and keeping an eye on the usual knee pops.

Spline Pass

Overall, I was happy with how the walk turned out. Don’t get me wrong—it could definitely use more polish, particularly with the hand poses and the overlapping action of the ponytails. I probably should have given her just one ponytail at the back of her head to make it simpler to animate.

That reminds me of the old abbreviation from Richard Williams’ book, K.I.S.S., which stands for “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” What an important lesson for every animation student to remember.

Final Animation