This has been my first go at animating a full on rig like this in such a complicated shot. I feel like there is plenty of room for improvement but hey, I wasn't expecting a masterpiece.
To begin I broke down the whole shot into individual acting beats. I would then focus on animating one beat at a time until it looked acceptable and then move onto the next beat and animate it. For example, one beat might be the character checking his watch (frames 30-46). Doing this made it less complicated when dealing with all the keys and the graph editor. I would also begin by focusing only on how the torso moves by hiding the arms and head. Once it was moving nicely I would then focus on the head, or the overlap of the arms. This way you don't get distracted by weirdly moving limbs whilst focusing on a different part of the body.
The hard part is obviously trying to apply some of the principles of animation to make it look appealing. It took a lot of tumbling around the rig and scrubbing through the motion to figure out some of the body mechanics. Frustrating but hugely satisfying when the character starts to behave the way you want it to.
Overall I think the shot is okay, there definitely needs to be some improvement but I am also looking forward to starting another shot soon.
Waiting for The Bus - Spline from James Saunders on Vimeo.
When I block out my next shot I will add a lot more information before moving to spline. In this shot I only really blocked the key poses and some extremes. It left me with a lot to neaten up once I was in spline mode. By adding some more breakdowns and anticipation it should hopefully give me more of a solid framework to build off once I go into spline mode.
Make sure to read this hugely helpul hint on 11 Second Club about "Moving past the fear of blocking"
No comments:
Post a Comment