I've put together my animations, and I'll attach play-blasts below, and talk a bit about the techniques I was going for and how they worked out.
This one was probably the worst. I'm still not happy with how his feet cross over one another, since it looks very awkward. I think that the core of this shot, his dizziness does convey, but at the same time there's some strange foot patterns on the walker. I was going for what was essentially a pendulum swing, where the body's balance is constantly getting thrown off. I wanted to challenge myself, and see how that would work. Mike suggested I make a platform underneath the character move, but I didn't have time to try that out, unfortunately.
This one was probably the worst. I'm still not happy with how his feet cross over one another, since it looks very awkward. I think that the core of this shot, his dizziness does convey, but at the same time there's some strange foot patterns on the walker. I was going for what was essentially a pendulum swing, where the body's balance is constantly getting thrown off. I wanted to challenge myself, and see how that would work. Mike suggested I make a platform underneath the character move, but I didn't have time to try that out, unfortunately.
I was initially skeptical of this animation, but I'm happy with the result. I just needed to make the animation more consistent across the run, and I think everything else fell into place. As well as that, I think that I neeeded a reference from real life. I watched a football game while animating this (Roma v Liverpool) and I found that once a footballer kicks the ball, they don't actually continue moving forward. They've actually put most of their momentum into the ball. So, I tried to match that in the animation, to try and get the feeling of a football kick across. As well as this, the ball follows the laws of physics, and bounces and descends realistically. I'm satisfied with this one. If anything, I would have liked to see a bit more emotion.
As mentioned in the last blog post on this topic, I wanted to really exaggerate the movement of this animation. To do this, I added a jiggling expression to his body when he's getting ready to jump. This, I hoped, would really show some force and energy in the front flip. I also added some follow through on the flip. If I have any regrets with this one, it's that I didn't try to use overlapping animation.
I also changed his wave a bit, to rotate from the knee, not so much the waist. Once again, I'm pretty happy with this one compared to the others.
Finally I've come to the first one I started with. I think that I've made quite an improvement on it. I think I've created a better sense of weight and momentum than was there before. I think that when I was making it initially, I wasn't thinking about weight and momentum as much as I was thinking about key-frames and poses. I relied too much on Pose-to-Pose, and not enough on straight Ahead Animation, and I forgot about my arcs in the process.
Overall, I'm pleasantly surprised by my walkers. I think I've made pretty lifelike animations, and I've exceeded my own expectations for this project. I think the reason behind that is that I've closely followed the Animator's Survival Kit and the 12 Principles. If anything went wrong, it was because I ignored those books.
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