AN02 - “Body Mechanics” - Assignment 03 - Physicality with Locomotion
“Nothing moves without a force being applied to it.”
— Wayne Gilbert, Animation Director and former Instructor at Animation Mentor
The quote above is so emblematic of my experience at Animation Mentor so far. It’s a simple statement with a TON of nuanced and important implications behind it.
Character movement can be broken into TWO big categories…
External forces - The movement of the physical parts of the characters body and how they translate or rotate to achieve movement.
Internal forces - This is WHY the character is moving.
Internal force is by far the most important aspect of animation. NOTHING happens without a reason. A character shouldn’t just get up out of a chair. They should get up out of a chair because they need a piece of cake from the fridge. Or maybe they get up from the chair because a spider scares them.
In both cases, the character gets out of the chair and moves, but reason for the movement dictates VERY different action. Communicating the reason for the action is the job of the animator.
Physicality with Locomotion
The 3rd assignment was FUN and I finally feel like I’m being pushed in both my skills and understanding.
The goal sounds simple…
This assignment will combine locomotion (walking) with a physical action (in this case, getting up from a seated position, or sitting down).
LOL… Simple and Easy are not the same…
Step 01 - Planning
My planning process for these complex assignments starts with a written goal…
This narrative gives me soooo much information about why the action is happening and all of this info makes it much easier to understand what needs to be done. After reading this, I can see in my mind exactly what needs to be done and it’s time for the next step… Video Reference.
Using time remapping in After Effects, I’m able to identify the key poses that communicate the action and that stepped version is what you see in the bottom right. These still frames are what will guide my work in Maya so the next step is to analyze how the body is moving from pose to pose.
To do that, I pull the still frames into Procreate on the iPad and draw on top of them and make notes as I go…
Step 02 - Blocking
This notation and sketching process is tedious, but so worth the effort and this work gives me the confidence to move into Maya for blocking and makes the blocking process go soooooooooo much faster!
In fact, the blocking went so fast that I was able to add in breakdown poses to communicate even more of the action more clearly…
Breakdown poses are kinda like “intermediate key frames”… If a “key frame” is a pose so important that it’s critical to defining the story, then a breakdown is a pose that is critical to defining the movement. These poses give just that little bit more info to tell the viewer (and the animator) what paths the parts of the body will take from key pose to key pose.
Step 03 - Splining
With blocking and breakdowns feeling pretty good, it’s time to let Maya do a bit of the work and define what happens from pose to pose.
It’s a very quick process. That GIF above is real time and produces this animation…
It’s not “bad” but there is a stilted and yet floating feel to the movement. Maya creates smooth movement between each of the keys but that is not enough to bring the character to life. You need to go through EACH of the controls and body parts to refine the movement.
Making these subtle changes to the curves and moving some of the keyframes around produces THIS…
It’s a big step in the right direction. The movement is starting to feel natural and it has weight and personality to it but there are still “subtleties” that I can’t see and that’s the point of Animation Mentor… To have an expert look at the work and tell you what’s wrong.
Step - 04 - Refinement
The most important piece of feedback I got from the Instructor, Dana Boadway Masson, was that there wasn’t enough “overlapping action”… the animation is very “pose to pose”. He moves from one key pose to the next in a mechanical fashion and humans don’t move that way. All our parts are moving all the time and they don’t all hit the same place in time at the same time. We use our entire body to move through the world.
Because I did so much work int he blocking/breakdown phase, I had a full extra week to do refinements and with amazing feedback from Dana, I was able add sound, and content on the TV for him to react to and that got me to this “final” result.
Assignment number 3 for Body Mechanics at Animation Mentor
I’m proud of the work I put into this project and how much I learned along the way! Here’s the progress all lined up…
Progress steps for assignment number 3 of Body Mechanics at Animation Mentor
