Animation Project: Body Mechanics - Part 4

 

 Animation Project - Body Mechanics

Part 4 - Overlap, Hands, and Refinement

June 2021

This project reaches its end as I have finished adding in the hand movements and final tweaks for the animation. With this last stretch of practice, I have gone back to further push the fluidity and timing of the animation. This segment took about twelve hours across six days of work to complete. I am happy to say this will be the final post on this project, at least for the time being.

 

I have observed what movements work best, and even taken out some steps that I felt served their purpose for blocking, but ultimately did not fit as well for an animated application. Small frame changes here and there that passed very fast were cut in order to maintain a better flow. I have found that it is better to have consistent and readable movement is better than complete accuracy to the reference material. One example is the quick motions in the torso and feet that really only last for a couple of frames. When played back in real time, while it does still sync up with the reference, the animation itself appears jittery, and too spastic for the common viewer to really pick up on. It would end up looking more wrong rather than right. Another example is keeping versus moving away from accurate timing in favor of fluid and snappy animations. While I preferred to sync the key frames, in-betweens, and holds as accurately as possible in the initial move to spline, in the end it was better to either shrink or extend the range of movements to really sell a movement as quick and energetic or paused and eccentric. I am glad to have taken and accepted such liberties.

Additionally, I implemented the finger/hand movements which I had neglected up until this point. I set up a library of poses for the most basic hand stances like neutral, clamped fist, pointing, and so on. I called upon these as was necessary as I played through the full animation, inserting them where it fit best. This process was very efficient, and in the end, worked seamlessly with the more intricate movements across the body. In this case, having a less-is-more mentality worked out, because viewers would be more focused on the overall sequence rather than something as fleeting as hand motions.

The challenges faced in this final stretch really came from the repetition and struggle to find balance between reference accuracy and personalized movement. Once I finished the finger and hand integration, it was a matter of going back through and seeing what works and what doesn't. Some parts had a really good transition from start to finish, while others seemed to have problems that I perhaps could have foreseen earlier and fixed, but now were too far gone to start over. In consequence, I tweaked what I could and ultimately settled for that. In another attempt, I might look closer at what movements to take more liberty with before diving into the intricate changes.

In conclusion, this project has taught me so much about what it takes to do a dynamic animation of a character. I was a bit overwhelmed by the scope of the project and how much of a challenge is posed, despite considering it a decent and necessary length of animation to tackle. It had many repeating movements, challenging twists and turns, and a varied pace that required extensive thinking in order to bring it all together. For the future, I would like to keep my scope tempered, maybe even more than this time.

My main takeaway from this project is to have an even better foresight and motivation for the desired outcome of a project. I feel I have gotten a much better idea of finding what I want to make versus what I expect to make. This project came out almost exactly as I had envisioned, and I am very happy to have reached a satisfactory endpoint.