Week 7: body mechanics (blocking&spline)

This week’s task is body mechanic. As usual, I first need a good reference, and I also want to make some cool-looking actions this time. In the end I chose an action called macaco in which the character flipped back with one hand.

In order to make the reference clearer and coherent, I edited the two movements together for easy observation.

This is my reference video:

After analysis, I think the difficulty of this action is mainly the switch between IK and FK. When the character moves from standing to supporting the ground with one hand, his feet are in IK state and his hands are in FK state because at this time the feet must be fixed on the ground and the hands have not yet reached a fixed point of support.

In the latter part of the action, the character supports the ground with one hand and both feet are off the ground. At this time, the character’s right hand in contact with the ground must be switched to IK, and the feet must be changed to FK.

In the last part of the action, the hand become FK again and the feet become IK.

Therefore, it should be noted here that during the IKFK switching process, the matching of the character’s action can not show the incorrect movement.

At the beginning, I wanted to find a suitable plug-in to use. I tried the universal IKFK Switch tool. It has a good performance in converting FK actions to IK actions, but when IK actions are converted to FK actions, satisfactory results are often not obtained. .

But I also found out that I can manually copy the bone parameters in IK state to FK. Although this operation is more troublesome, it can be FK action or exactly the same as IK action.

IK FK key frames:

The process of Blocking is the same as before. I chose the basic key frame, which is based on the change of the movement trend. For example, 1-10 frames are hip down, 10-16 frames hip up and so on. The principles to be concerned about in this animation are Timing, Arcs, Slow in&Slow out, Stretch&Squash, Overlapping.

This is the blocking animation I did:

In the spline stage, I found that there are some small actions that need to be added, which should belong to the secondary action in the principal, which can add more details to the entire animation. And the timing of the entire action needs to be adjusted, and the part that needs to be more prominent.

This is my spline animation:

In addition, I also made another action blocking. I tried to connect the two actions, but I found that simple connection of this kind of action is not enough. The overall movement trend and power point need to be designed to make the animation appear coherent. I will continue to try.

This is my blocking animation:

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