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!

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