Part1: Stylised Walk

How are they different to a normal walk cycle?

In my opinion, the biggest difference between stylized walk and normal walk is that the former has emotions, and the audience can clearly understand the current character’s mental state from this animation. The animation is not like a novel. The information that the audience gets is from the source and the picture. We can’t directly tell them that the protagonist is happy or sad now, but to convey the message through performance.

What sort of things should we be trying to put in to a stylised walk?

As for the principles of animation, the timing, arcs and pose to pose that is considered when making a normal walk should also be considered in the stylised walk. In my opinion, in the basic walking exercise, you can get a basic stylised walk by changing the amplitude of the pose, adding slow in&slow out, and adjusting the timing.

For example, in this week’s production, I chose Tomas cat to make animation. His action style would be more exaggerated and the movement range would be larger. When making, you should consider adding body bending. Note that Arcs and Squash&Streach should be more obvious in cartoon characters. At the same time, pay attention to the movement and overlap of the tail and ears. The movement poses of the legs and hips have not changed much. What needs to be noted is its timing. The frame number of the key pose should be determined according to the reference.

What principles have we been focusing on so far?

In the previous animation, we mainly focused on the squash&stretch, timing, arcs.

What principles should we now be focusing on?

Now we should also foucs on the pose to pose，overlaping，slow in& slow out

What is the correct workflow for reference?

I think when looking for a reference first, we should know what a good reference is. For me, a good reference should be clear, preferably with both front and side images. At the same time, its playback speed should be normal, and it will not accelerate or decelerate, which helps me grasp the rhythm of the animation during analysis.

After finding a good reference, I will analyze this movement first and select the keyframe. I generally choose the previous frame of the movement trend change as the keyframe. I will take a screenshot and mark the number of frames, and then export a sequence of frames or gif for subsequent reference.

I chose Tomas cat in Tom & Jerry, because I watched this animation since I was a child and have a deep impression of Tomas’s confident walking posture, so I first looked for the video clips in the original. But I found that there was only one angle, and I couldn’t see the position of some mountains and legs. So I looked for other similar action references, including real-life and animated ones.

These are my reference footages：

In terms of timing, I mainly refer to the original animation. I disassembled it into a storyboard and marked the keyframes, stepping on me to determine the timing of the animation.

Here is my storyoard:

I first made a video of 24 frames per second and marked each frame.

Then I try to reduce the number of frames, I finally reduced to 11 frames, including the first frame and the last frame. I chose frame 1, 4, 6, 7, 11, 13, 16, 18, 19, 23, 25.

They are almost indistinguishable visually, and the persistence of the human eye is enough to make the 11-frame picture look coherent.

Then I drew an animation referring to all my materials to determine what I wanted to look like.

So I got a clear reference, which is basically the same as the walking animation before.

Here is my blocking pass of aniamtion：

Part2：Breakdown of rigs

What is a good rig?

For me, a good rig is when I open the project, I see neat Control Curves, and the position of the control curve should be clear; the animator should be able to know exactly what effect the curve will have on a specific part of the character , Without having to select it first. The control curves should also be large enough to be seen so that the animator can easily select them.

Of course, there are some excellent bindings with GUI Picker, which is more convenient for animators to choose a controller, especially facial animation. Because the face usually has the densest controllers, in order to make more subtle expressions.

When it comes to expression animation, a good rig usually has more freedom of facial animation control, especially the eyes and mouth. They can achieve more changes than simply blinking or opening and closing the mouth. Some bindings can even achieve pupil scaling.

A good rig should also have the function of switching between IK and FK. Although most of my animations currently use IK, especially leg movements, sometimes I want to use FK to achieve specific postures for some hand animations. . So it is best that each finger joint can be controlled individually.

When starting an animation, a good Rig should have clean deformation, which is the most important aspect in my opinion. When the character raises his hand or bends over, his shoulders and stomach should deform correctly. This requires very precise weight rendering and grid structure.

Finally, I would like to say that it is best to have an overall zoom function so that the character can adapt to various scenes or make scale animation.

What is a bad rig?

I think in simple terms, bad rig is the opposite of good rig, bad deformation, unclear controller, etc. I haven’t used bad rig too much, generally I just give up when I see bad binding haha.

However, I have had a problem. In fact, the rig includes the foot controller but there is no clear control curve. Therefore, I did not find that the tiptoe can be made directly but by rotation, which caused the final animation effect to be bad.

So, in order to get a better understand of the rigging, I tried to use Advanced skeleton5 to rig a model I once made.

I mainly tried facial rigging. At first, I was quite satisfied with the results, but when I used his own expression parameters to test, I found some problems, such as strange deformation and wrong mouth squash.

If you want to achieve natural deformation, you need to further modify the weight. I tried to control the expression manually and got a slightly better expression, but it really cannot be said to be a good rig because it is not convenient to use. Hope I can further learn how to optimize the binding to improve this problem.

Part3: Constrains in animation

What are constraints?

In last week’s blog, I briefly wrote about the use of parent constrain. And there are other forms of constraints. Constrain is a very convenient feature that allows us to constrain the position, direction or scale of an object to other objects. In addition, with constraints, you can impose specific restrictions on objects and automatically perform animation processing.

Parent

With parent constraints, you can associate the translation and rotation of one object with another object so that they behave as part of a parent-child relationship with multiple target parent objects. It should be noted that the rotation of the child object is around the parent object.

When a parent constraint is applied to an object, the constrained object does not become part of the constrained object’s hierarchy or group, but remains independent and behaves like a child of its target.

Point

The constrained object only restricts the displacement of the constrained object but has no effect on the direction.

Orient

The constrained object only restricts the rotation of the constrained object but has no effect on the displacement. The rotation here is the respective rotation.

Scale

The constrained object only has a constraining effect on the size of the constrained object and has no effect on others.

Aim

Aiming constraints limit the direction of an object so that it can aim at other objects. Typical uses of aiming constraints include aiming lights or cameras at an object or group of objects. In character settings, the typical use of aiming constraints is to set a locator to control eye movement.

Pole vector

The pole vector constraint causes the end of the pole vector to move and follow the position of the object or the average position of several objects. In the character setup, the pole vector of the IK rotation plane handle used for the arm joint chain is usually constrained to the locator placed behind the character.

Parenting vs parent constraint?

“Parenting” neutron objects can still move freely,

The child object in “parent constraint” cannot be moved, even if it is moved, if the parent object is moved again, it will be restored to the position at the time of constraint, unless the offset value of the child object is adjusted separately;

“Parenting” has an effect on the “position”, “rotation” and “scale” of the sub-object

The “parent constraint” only affects the “position” and “rotation” of the child object.

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Finally, I want to mark something, I think these are indeed easy to overlook but have a very important impact on animation production.

Common areas people skip:

Breaking down reference footage in to storyboard key poses and inbetweens with frame numbers.

Inbetweens in blocking

Controlling the curves when moving to spine

Fingers in blocking and adding overlap in spline

Facial animation in blocking

Ensuring there are no penetrations in spline

Weight in spline is still reading