Fixing + Final Product

I had to fix the walk, it just seemed out of place for the character. So I decided to have a look at the walks chapter from the Animator's Survival Kit and came across exactly what I was hoping to find.

It mentioned that the differences between Males and Females. While males have more up and down movement in their walks, females have the complete opposite. Aside from the lack of up and down movement in their steps: the have more movement in their hips and their feet go inwards when they put their feet down (partly due to if they're wearing dresses then it restricts the movement somewhat). The chapter compared it to walking on a tight rope - where you have your feet moving inwards with every step to stay on the rope so you don't fall. I also used a video from a YouTube channel called Endless Reference that was given to me by a course mate in the year below and it has a lot of footage for things such as walks, runs, and other exciting actions. Here's a link to the video I used as reference for remedying the walk. (Click here.)

From the video it had exactly what was said in the Animator's Survival Kit - more prominent hip movement and lack of up and down movement as well as the feet going in similar to walking on a tightrope. 

Despite reading about it, I didn't have the feet move in  front after every step - got everything else done except that. I also didn't loop it either as there was an issue with one of the frames - in fact, at one point it just did all the movements bar the small up or just the up and down movement with the arms and everything else moving.

                                                                    .    .     .    .    .   .

This is the final product. I won't lie when I say that I am disappointed with it, but I do feel this is something to look back on and learn from so that next time I can then do this again and produce something I can fully be proud of, despite those feelings - I don't think it's too bad, but it could be a lot better. The main thing I am dissapointed with was that all the research and blog posts for a whole year and this is all I have to show for it that was considered decent for the hand in - though as I mentioned earlier, it's something I can look back at and learn from for the future. It won't deter me from practicing all this stuff in future, truth is I am actually looking forward to learning more about animation and character set up.

I did a variety of batch renders of the walk from different angles, batch rendering is when you render a bunch of frames as images, and then once that's done you put it into a movie editing software to put the images in and then create the video from those.

So the angles I done were: perspective, side, and front.

Here is the result:

First Walk Animation Attempt

This was the next animation I tried to do, this was just going to be a simple walk - seeing as walks are important within animation, it made sense to see if I can get this done for the project. Here was how it turned out.

I thought I managed to get the up and down movement moving well and in-sync as well as the placement of the feet. Despite getting the placement right of what limbs should be where – it didn’t look right. It turned out that for a female character I was giving her a walk that would be on a male character. Here is what I got done for the animation – it was scrapped, but I figured it’d be good to show you what I did and the next post will explain to you how I remedied this.

Jump Animation

After the first failure of an idle animation, I tried my luck in doing a Jump Animation. The character would be jumping onto a surface, to give myself a bit of a guideline for it, Dominic thought it be best if he recorded me doing that action as it would be something to study as a guide line for the key poses (apologizes to the lecturers in advance for the video - it was purely for study purposes).

I studied the part of the video that was in slow motion. From the video there, the key poses I had to make sure were perfect was the start (0:04), to the bend half where my arms where down (0:05), to the where my body no longer goes down (0:07), the part to where my body now stretches up-right along with my foot coming off the group and on the ball of my foot (0:09), (0:10) my body in the air and my feet tucking up more - so my legs don't hit the table, and finally the contact as I land on the table (0:11) feet are firmly planted and I lean my body forward slightly to shift the weight from the back to the front - which'll mean I don't fall backwards off the table.

Fig 1: Shoulder issue

Now I had the key actions needed, I had to get to creating the animation itself. This didn't turn out well also - there main issue I had was the arms - it could of been how they were rigged or how well (or badly) I did the influences for those parts of the arms but when I moved the shoulders and rotated them some of the mesh comes out (Fig 1) - I would of switched to IK for the arms but with the issue that I spoke about in a couple of posts not resolved (but worked around) - couldn't risk it so it meant that the arms are just dangling at the side - which is a shame as you saw in the video above the arms' movement do play a key role in it as well and would of given it more life. I will embed the video in this post now.

Another reason for the failure was that I didn't bend the top part of the body more, and here's a picture to show why I didn't (Fig 2). 

Fig 2: Bend Issue

The back bends awkwardly and you can also see that at the buttock area that the mesh moves where it's not supposed too. and moving the lower back control gives it a really awkward hump when it's in this position. (Fig 3)

Fig 3: Awkward hump at the lower back when I move the control that affects that area

So, from the video of the character, you can see that the back is too straight and it looks a bit like a frog jumping more than it does an actual person. 

It seems more to do with issues with the set up of the character more than anything, especially for things such as this - here's hoping the walk attempt pans out much better than the previous two attempts.

Idle Animation Attempt

This is the first of a few posts about the animations I did (or for the most part, attempted) to create. I tried to do at least three animations I could be proud of but unfortunately only got to submit one that was the best out of the lot. (Note, the blogs were created but the videos weren't - updated that recently)

While the others were not submitted - I do want to share with you my attempts on how I tried to get to grips with this process. Remember that this blog is just as much about my learning throughout this journey of gaining knowledge for animation.

So, the first thing I tried to do was create an Idle animation (or an animation for a character who would do an action when left for a long time). I wanted to convey that the character was nervous and shy. I found an image on-line that showed body language (click here for full image).

Fig 1: taken from the image available in the hyperlink above

(Fig 1) Picture above is taken from an image I found on deviant art and it depicts a character coming across shy. First thing that comes to mind is that the body is all hunched up together - shoulders are quite high up, the head is facing downwards, and her feet are pointing inwards.

I tried to do something that tried to give off the impression that my character was shy, but I wanted to add some movement to eat otherwise it'd be just standing there. So my thought process was observations I saw people do when they were shy or nervous. First thing that came to mind was the head - avoiding eye contact any time they could so I had my character have her head more over and over, I then thought maybe shifting the hips from side to side will give the character more life, and have the shoulder move up and down. The problem with this and the reason why it turned out to be a failure was because that instead of looking nervous and shy - it looked more like a dance more than anything and the legs didn't turn out that well either - they slide across the floor near the end..

I figured it be a good idea to put embed the video into the post - this way you can see just where I am getting at.

The thought was there but I realized that this is kind of going away from what I set out to do - if I wanted to look into body language and such I would of set out to do so at the beginning. Either way it's still stuff to blog about.

Binding Process: Set Up #11 - Paint Weights Tool

This tool allows you to go paint the weights in manually on your model – which means you can determine if a joint as a little influence, maxium influence or no influence for certain joints. This was my more preferred method in comparison to using the Component Editor I spoke about in an earlier post.

Fig 1: The hierarchy in the Paint Weights Tool

When in the Paint Weights Tool, the important bit I had to remember the three colours that were visible when I selected a joint within the hierarchy: Black, White, and Grey (Fig 2).

Fig 2: The colours used to represent the influence

• Black = no influence
• Grey = partial influence
• White = maxium influence

Fig 3: Paint Weights expanded

There are also 4 main kinds of painting for the weights (Fig 4): Add, Replace, Smooth and Scale (didn't use that). Painting with Add does exactly what it says - Adds the amount of influence you want onto a part of the mesh. Works well for adding that little bits of influence for small parts of a character.  

Replace will replace any part of influence on the mesh with the value that it is set. Works well 

Smooth is used for parts of the mesh where certain vertices bend into each other. This proved particularly useful for the part of the mesh that's at the back of the knees. 

Fig 4: Smooth Paint weight is used for the bend at the back of the knee.

This way was particularly more easier to use than the previous way - it just seemed a better way of seeing where influence needed to be especially if you have a small animation of particular movement on the joints just help keep an eye for detail in that sense.

I would of liked to go on more about the set up part of the binding process, but I feel as if I have covered more than enough on the technical side of the process, now to the animating.

Binding Process :Set Up #10 - Component Editor

I am not going to go into every single bit about the skinning process - I will explain the two techniques I used and where they came in use.

Now that the rigging was complete, there was just the issue of binding the rig to the model. But once that was done I had to fix the influences of the model. I won’t go into too much detail about these process as there is still lots more I want to talk about, but I will go over the main bits of this process that gave me a lot of trouble to deal as well as the two main techniques I found useful for this.

The first technique I used was using the Component Editor.

Fig 1: Component Editor (Dope Sheet) with the vertices selected and the joints that influence those points

(Fig 1) When you select the vertex (or vertices) on a model, and open up this window, you shown with all the joints in your rig in the form of a spreadsheet, with this you see at what points where moving the joints in where the selected vertices are influence other places that should not be affected at all. It is also known as Dope Sheet Editing (spoke about briefly here).

I didn’t really use this method of editing the influences too much – I only really used it for fixing the problem with the legs. I selected the vertices on the left leg and opened up the component editor and noticed from the sheet that there was a little bit of influence that was being carried over to the opposite leg whenever I moved it – so, all I did was highlight of the values in the leg opposite and then pressed 0 – this changed all it’s values to 0, which meant now that when and if I move that leg, then the leg next to it wasn't affected (Figs 2 and 3).

Fig 2: Columns now changed to 0 - meaning no influence when I move the left leg in those areas.

Fig 3: I now can move the left leg without the opposite foot and ankle moving with it.

I didn't really use this way for tweaking influences as much - it's good for zeroing out on certain limps and it was nice to look use something that I did read about earlier on.

Set Up #9 - IK/FK Switch for Arms Issue

This messed up quite a bit - I don't know how it messed up, and I don't know why it did, but it went horribly wrong.

This post would of spoken about the creating switch to allow the arms to go from Inverse Kinematics (IK) to Forward Kinematics (FK). While it ended up as failure - I still want to share with you what I did and how it would of worked if it went smoothly.

So, the first thing I did was duplicate the Wrist Control wrist twice, I then snapped those curves to the shoulder joint and the elbow joint of the arm. Once they were positioned (Fig 1) - I froze the transformations and named them as the following:

• shoulderFKControl
• wristFKControl

Fig 1: Highlighted curves for each arm, appropriately named

I then proceeded to add a Point Constraint to those points and then I added an Orient Constraint. The problem now that while the controls were set up - I could not move them. This was because the I needed to switch the joints from IK Mode to FK Mode. If you click the IK Handle there is a value that's called ik_Blend and that's the value that'll be used for another Set Driven Key. I had to create another attribute on the wrist control curve and called it ik_fk Blend - and this will be the driver attribute I used for this Driven Key.

After this was all set up I clicked on the visibility values in the driven as this will be what is affected and hit key, the issue that came up was something I couldn't fix but had to work around, but when I set the joints to FK and then IK - nothing moved at all. I spent a good hour trying to figure out what and where went wrong and I couldn't fix it so I re-opened a version previous and create the switch without testing it after moving it into FK mode.

That was it for the rig set up, now it's time for the skinning techniques.