Character Animation Portfolio 4: Animating the Character
The animations are now planned so the next step is to actually animate the character using the rig. To start the process of making them I found reference videos online that I could use for some parts of my animations.
All of my animations were set to 24 fps. My method of animation was to get key poses from my references and then slowly add more fluid and realistic movement through different straight ahead passes focusing on different elements of the animations. Each of my key poses were usually every 6 frames and then I would add more every 2 frames if it was necessary to make the animation look better. Sometimes I would animate on the in-between frames if the animation didn’t look quite right. This is the process I used for all three of my animations and as I progressed I slowly started to really getting in the flow of it.
I aimed to add anticipation and arcs to the movements of my character to make my animations at least seem more natural to the best of my ability. I would’ve liked to try and exaggerate some of the poses more but because of the limitations of both my character rig and base model I was unable to experiment with extreme exaggerations. I attempted to add some ease in/ease out in my animations but I think this wasn’t that successful.
I did have to model some simple objects for my animations but I didn’t put a lot of time into these as the main focus was the animation and not the secondary objects involved in them. Some animation was applied to these objects but it was to do with keyframing the position of these objects after the character interacted with them.
After all the animation was done I then focused on the camera so that my animations were staged correctly. My main method for this was locking the camera to the character using a point constraint on the camera which meant that no matter what was happening in my animations the camera would be looking at the character. I did do some experimenting with the camera positioning to add some extra appeal to some of the animations as well as using a blend point on the camera constraint so that the camera could disconnect from the character if it would be better for the animation.
Below are examples of my animation references and early versions of my animations.
Animation 1:
Animation 2:
Animation 3:
References:
Aozolai. (2019) Halo Reach | What does Armor Lock do? [Video]. Available online: https://youtu.be/Hl22SFfve8Q [Accessed 12/5/2022].
endlessreference. (2011) Athletic Male Angry walk – Slow Motion half speed. Animation Reference Body Mechanics. [Video]. Available online: https://youtu.be/ZPI7_oVNB24 [Accessed 10/5/2022].
endlessreference. (2011) Forward Roll: Athletic Male: Grid Overlay – Animation Reference Body Mechanics [Video]. Available online: https://youtu.be/MWHP6Z5HRkU [Accessed 11/5/2022].
endlessreference. (2012) Walk Limp Young Adult Male: Grid Overlay – Animation Reference Body Mechanics [Video]. Available online: https://youtu.be/AG_eITx8miE [Accessed 10/5/2022].
20th Century Studios UK. (2016) Deadpool | ‘Superhero Landing’ | Official HD Clip 2016 [Video]. Available online: https://youtu.be/EwUilIo036g [Accessed 10/5/2022].