I recently finished animating on the last shot for my friend's final year project Bertie the Elephant. Since it was my last shot too I thought i'd put everything i've got into it. It was probably the hardest shot I've ever had to animate so I thought I'd write about the workflow I took to animate it. However i will say that there is no right or wrong way to animate a shot. There are probably better and faster ways to do this as i'm still just sort of figuring out stuff for myself!
For context the elephant has just returned the toy to the girl and is walking away gleefully from the house.
After discussing some ideas with the leads of 'Bertie the Elephant' (Zak and Chris) we settled on the idea that Bertie would cross the road and then look back at the girls house before proceeding to walk towards the camera and out of frame. With this basic idea I began to plan, research and maximise the entertainment value of the shot.
Research!
Probably the most important aspect in doing any creature shot, realistic or cartoony, is doing research of the animal that you're animating. I watched plenty of baby elephant videos on youtube so I could simply get a feel for the way the move and interact with the world. I would also try and find footage that matched what I had in mind for my shot, relevant walks and head turns basically. Then by taking the best bits of video reference I went and imported them into maya for a reference guide.
Blocking
Once all the video reference was in I began to animate!! But before leaping straight into all the little details of the shot i wanted to make sure the basic movement, timing and screen position of the elephant was looking good. To do this i simply slid around the global controller of the elephant into the areas i wanted, easy! Once i was reasonably happy I then created a large sphere that moved along with the elephant. I did this so that when I muted the global animation on the rig to start properly animating the sphere would show me where to go! I then took the local body controller of the elephant (which controls the entire body except the feet) and animated the movement of the elephant with that. If it was up to me i would have hid the legs but since i couldn't i keyed them in to follow beneath the elephant.
In the end the blocking looked something like this (password: bertie)
blocking 002 from James Saunders on Vimeo.
It looks rubbish but the basic timing and movement is there as a skeleton to work from.
ANIMATING WOO
Once all the blocking seemed good i then began to really start animating! I decided to break the shot down into two parts from here; the walk up until he looks back at the house, and then the run towards camera. So, i began by looking at some happy walking reference from earlier and dove straight in. I just focused on trying to get the rough placement and timing of all the feet first, especially since the elephant starts to turn to walk almost sideways. By getting all this information down into maya it gave me a pretty solid base to move around and play with. I didn't detail too much in as i knew my first guess of these placements would be close but not perfect.
Getting the feet placements and timings correct was probably the toughest part about the shot. Especially when the animation has to drift away from any video reference that you have. When this happens it's just a case of gritting your teeth and using your animation knowledge and research to make sure the timing and posing still looks good. There wasn't an easy way to do this!!
After a while I had something like this (password: bertie):
Bertie - Blocking 003 from James Saunders on Vimeo.
Again it's still rubbish looking at first glance but I'm slowly getting the feet positions into roughly the right places.
Also look at how much i'm managing to use from the video reference in this shot and mould it into what i want to use. I have a feeling that the more advanced an animator you become, the less tied you are to the video reference in the way that i was. That being said, by the time i got to the end of the shot i had deviated quite a lot from just animating from one single piece of reference.
Once I was fairly happy with the feet positions I went back and did another pass over the whole shot. I put in more detail such as the hip and shoulder rotations and paid more attention into getting the elephant to move smoothly. After this stage I was at a fairly good place body mechanics wise and acting wise. Password: bertie
Bertie - Blocking 005 from James Saunders on Vimeo.
He's still a bit wibbly wobbly towards the end but I'm now way closer to what i wanted to achieve out of the shot.
Throughout the animation I would make tons of notes on ways to improve the shot. Generally i'd playblast to check my progress and then write down all the areas i found wrong with the shot. I'd then go back to maya and address my own notes. This way I never found myself wasting time by noodling with unimportant issues with the animation. Highly recommend doing this!!
Polish
The final stage is the polish stage. It's where you begin to tidy up all the little details in the mechanics, smooth out any graph editor curves and in general just get the shot ready for handin. The trickiest part of the polish stage is getting rid of any knee pops and weird leg movement overall. But really, the hard part is over and with a few extra days needling out any weighting issues i got this (passowrd: bertie):
Bertie - FINAL from James Saunders on Vimeo.
Wahoo! A finished elephant shot :) :) All in all this shot took about 8 solid days work. Hopefully with more practice i can increase my speed.
Anyway, hopefully that helps illuminate my creature workflow for this type of shot. I think workflow varies widely from shot to shot depending on the movement of the character but through experience it should be easier to spot the correct direction to take! That's all for now, will post up the finished film soon in all it's rendered glory!
James
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