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

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.

Important principles: Timing, Arcs, pose to pose

First, I need to find a clear reference, preferably with a frame count and a corresponding pose.

Previs, Blocking, spline and polish:

This is the usual way to do animation, or I think it can be a common way to work in other fields. That is, starting from layout, first complete the first overall matters, then make them in turn, and then decorate them all together.It’s efficient.Here I refer to 《The Animator’s Survival Kit》.

The reason for not making loops is also mentioned in this book, which would make the animation look very stiff, as game animations could be made that way, it was interactive. Animators should focus on more interesting and attractive animations.

Previs: Start with a rhythm. Instead of using spline, start with step Tangents. I choosed 5 frames, and I started with 12 frames per step, 24 frames per second.

In addition, you can save a lot of time by setting the mode in Preferences in advance.

Blocking：I pose on the keyframe determined by previs. First I just focused on the side view and animated the walk. And adding start and stop action, mainly pay attention to the center of gravity changes.

After making the side and looking at the front, we can see that the ball now walks straight without any body shaking. However, when walking, the center of gravity will change from side to side with the lifting of the legs, so we need to add the rotation and translation of the ball body here.

At the end I added a turn to move, considering the bending direction of the knee, and I need to add key frames to the knee, and the animation of the knee joint is dependent on the IK.

Again, I’m going to animate with step tangents, but notice the change of center of gravity here.

Before spline, I checked the blocking animation for several times again, so as to confirm that there is no sliding part on the foot. If it needs sliding, it is better to make a steady step first and then add sliding, so as to make it more convenient for making and modification.

Ok, now that we can change Step Tangents to Spline Tangents in the curve editor, you can see that the action is smoother, but it’s a little weird.

In the curve editor we can see that there are a lot of keyframes, and I think this might be a strange time to change the action too much, so I decided to try to delete some of them first.

I noticed that there were some problems that occurred between two key frames with the same value, and Spline Tangents made them fluctuate between them when we actually wanted them to be horizontal.I ended up using Auto Tangents to solve this problem.

Finally, in the polish part, I would like to add some Squash&Stretch to the ball to reflect its elasticity and give people a soft feeling.

This is my walking animation:

But I have to say that I don’t like the final animaiton. I don’t know what the problem is, I will study further and improve this animation later.

The task was to animate the ball with tail at least five times, starting, as usual, with a reference video to analyze the motion.

I mainly refer to this video.

All three states of the tail animation is very clear, is a good reference video.Through the video, I found that the principles of Aniamtion which should be paid more attention to in the tail animation was squashed and stretch, brimmed with anticipation, arcs and timing.Moreover, since the tail itself follows the movement of the ball, the animation can be divided into two parts, one is the movement of the ball itself, and the other is the swing of the tail

First of all, I wanted to make the ball more than simply jumping on the flat ground for five times in a row. I wanted this animation to be more interesting, so After I imagined the movement route of the ball, I first designed a sketch in PS, which was mainly about the design of pose and movement track.In my opinion, the most attractive factor of an animation is the change, such as the change of speed and shape. If it is just a simple repetition of a movement, even if it is very interesting, people will soon get bored. So I wanted the ball to rise up in the first few jumps, then jump off the platform like a diver, and finally give the ball a cushioned jump and brake, so that the animation was more like a plot-like animation than a boring repetitive jump.

The overall process is similar to last week’s maze animation, but I have tweaked it in a few places.

First of all, on the Y-axis transformation, because this time the ball is not only experiencing force change, but also exerting force itself, I let the ball stay for two more frames when it falls on the ground several times, giving it one more time to change.

In addition, I noticed that the squash-Stretch of the ball also needs to be further optimized. The compressed state of the force of the ball and the vibration of the ball when it falls from the height can be reflected in Squash-Stretch.

（Its own power）

（Shock buffer on landing）

And then the animation of the tail, and I think arcs is very important here, because the tail itself is soft, and the smooth curve makes the tail look smooth.In the process of making the tail, I first set the pose of the tail at several key frames. It should be noted that the closer the tail is to the body, the more the tail is swung and the whole tail moves like a wave.Then gradually add details to smooth the movement of the tail.It’s worth noting that because the ball is jumping so much, the tail should also be brimming. I think it’s the principle of brimming for baby. If I want the ball to jump for baby, I will put the ball into compression and feel brimming with anticipation with its tail pushed up.

This is my tail animation:

Tips: At the beginning, use as few keyframes as possible to determine the motion trail of the ball, as the tail animation may need to be modified later.Fewer and more accurate keyframes will make the changes clearer.

In this week’s class, I learned some preference settings, which I did not know before. The modification of preference greatly improved my animation production efficiency.

In these tasks, I think the important animation principles are timing, squash&stretch and arcs.

In the process of animating a bouncing ball, I mainly considered the squash and stretch. Because I think it is very important to show the power in this animation. In order to achieve better effect, I need a good rigged ball. Firstly, I watched the video in the moodel. I found that it used the skeleton, which is not what I wanted, and it’s a little complicated. So I decided to rig a ball by myself. After watching some videos on Youtube, I found there are many ways to achieve it, like using IK skeleton(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcXZ6qCKV7) or deform(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xybiY6yRtM). Finally, I choosed to use the lattice deformation to make the limit state of the ball, and to control the squash and stretch by blend shape(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_C4q6L0dIiM). Because I think it’s really straightforward to determine the size, and it’s easy to make.

This is my bouncing ball animation:

To add more detail, I also watched some reference videos on YouTube, I noticed that there are some rotation in the process of the ball bounce, but there wa a problem on my own rigging ball. When the rotation and squash&stretch exist at the same time, the deformation cannot be right. So I can only give up part of rotation, which let the first part of the animation look a little bit strange. I hope I can fix it when I do another task.

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I found a nice rigging ball today, but it used the Squash effect in Deform instead of using blend shape. It’s excellent, this method makes the process of animating more flexible because the self-rotation of the ball doesn’t affect the squash&stretch direction.

This is my bouncing ball maze animation:

I didn’t have a reference for this animation, I just watched some balls bouncing in the different environments. I wanted to design a maze that showed a good and comfortable visual rhythm. I also wanted there were more changes in the animation, such as arcs and lines, fast and slow. So I spent a lot of time in adjusting the position of the ball.

I think it is the timing in the principles of animaiton. Thanks to the motion trail, I could design the animation more intuitively. After that, I added the rotation and squash&stretch quickly, and finally achieved a reasonable effect.