Advanced Animation — Project 1 & 2

27.05.2023 —
Rachel Madeline / 0356994
Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media
Project 1 — Walk Cycle & Jump Animation

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❥INSTRUCTIONS 

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❥TASK 

For this task, we are instructed to animate the vanilla walk cycle and an attitude walk. A vanilla walk cycle is a common walk cycle which features a character walking normally whilst an attitude walk refers to a walk with the character expressing a certain attitude in its walk. 

1A. VANILLA WALK CYCLE

Animating the walk cycle made me realize that we have to pay attention to not only the leg and foot movements, but also chest and waist movements on the FK and IK rigs, then work on tweaking the graphs. 

Fig 1.1 Waist movement and graph 

Fig 1.2 Another waist movement and graph 

Fig 1.3 Chest movements and graph

Fig 1.4 Arm movements and graph

Fig 1.5 Final Walk Cycle

1B. ATTITUDE WALK CYCLE

For attitude walk, I've decided to do the angry walk and took some notes while observing certain details of the character's angry walk.

I found more details along the way of tweaking the attitude walk to further emphasize the anger in the walk. 

Details:

- Angry expression

- Hands are in shape of fist

- Arm swing movement is more rigid and arms are mostly kept straight

- Stronger impact on the foot stomps

- Chest and hip movement are more impactful on foot stomping 

- From the side the character should have a bit of a hunchback

Fig 2.1 Attitude walk cycles

Fig 2.2 Tweaking during attitude walk

Fig 2.3 Final Attitude walk Video

Fig 2.4 Compiled Final Video for Project 1

2. JUMP ANIMATION

For the next project, we had to animate the character doing a cartoon jump which is an exagerrated version of the normal jump which is what we were taught to do by Mr Kamal in class.

I started to do some research for references for a cartoon jump on youtube and paid attention to the extreme poses. 

Fig 3.1 Reference cartoon jump

I mostly focused on the jump keyframes where the character is in the air and made it a bit longer and slower.

Fig 3.2 Keyframe progress

After focusing on the extreme poses, I decided to slow down and prolong the process of when the character was squatting about to jump and when he was landing to make it more realistic and dynamic. 

Fig 3.3 Keyframes progress

Fig 3.4 Final Cartoon jump animation 

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❥FEEDBACK 

Make sure to slow down the landing part where he stands up and add minimal follow through animations.

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❥REFLECTION 

These projects were the start of doing actual animations and even thought he process was all foreign to me, I still enjoyed the learning process overall. The only process I found tedious was having to render and export them since it is time consuming and when the rendering messes up halfway then I'd usually have to repeat it.