Considering that I tried to polish the walking ball last week, so I plan to add a prop to the final walking animation, and I’ll do a new walking animation to practice polishing.

Last week I made an animation of the walking ball, considering that the ball has no hands, I wanted to add something to his bald head, like a hat.

I found a suitable asset on Sketchfab. After resizing and positioning, the ball had a Magic hat.

For the hat to move with the ball, I need to make a parent constrain here. The head of the ball is the parent object and the hat is the child object. Before doing this, I create a control curve for the hat to follow, which is very helpful for me to do the next step.

Next, I just need to choose rigging->Constrain->parent, and the hat can follow the ball.

But the effect is a little stiff, the hat itself is too rigidly attached to the ball, and the tail-like part of the hat doesn’t move. To achieve these effects, I think I should create some bones to the tail-like part of the hat firstly.

Actually, I think that not only does it look like a tail, it moves in the same way. In other words, the principles of animation to be considered here are also Timing, Arcs and Pose to Pose.But because this part is smaller, it doesn’t have to be as exaggerated as the pose of the tail.

In addition, the hat should not touch the head all the time, it should be a little wobbly, especially when the ball is moving up and down, the hat can leave the ball in the air for a short time. So I need to keyframe the hat on the Y-axis. But I can’t use the control curve that I made for the hat before, because it’s a child of the ball, which cannot be changed. Therefore, I made a group of the mesh of the hat, so that I can control the up and down movement of group1 to indirectly control the movement of the hat.

This is my final animation:

About polishing, I first made a loop animation of walking in place this week. I think this kind of loop animation should be more common in game production. On the other hand, polish the loop animation first, which is also helpful for making other animations later. In the production of full-body walking animation, in addition to the legs and hip that have been practiced before, the rotation of the shoulders and the swing of the arms are also important, which is also explained in more detail in the The Animator’s Survival Kit. Here,I think that the key principles are to Pose to Pose, Overlapping, Timing and Arcs, and of course some Stretch&Squash. I mainly refer to this video:

Here’s the walking loop animation I making:

But it’s still a little boring to animate in palce, so I wanted to animate the whole body with some props, and try to animate something with some contents, like plots or just some atmospheres. So I chose a Robot from the Assets Library, and I wanted him to take a hand gun. I did this by making the Robot holding the gun with its right hand at frame 0, then using the parent constrain to keep the gun in the robot’s hand.

The whole process is similar to the previous animation of the walking ball, and it is also the previs->blocking->spline->polish. Moreover, because the gun is held on the robot’s hand all the time, there is no need to wave the arm, and only need to pay attention to the rotation of the shoulder.

Then I added some details, such as the rotation of the toes and the twist of the waist. I also made a simple scene. But I think the final animation is not good, the Robot should be some mechanical, but it’s a little difficult for me right now. I hope I can refine this in the future..

This is my final animation:

I also tried the lighting and rendering flow, and this is a rendering image.