Animation - Body Mechanics

Character animation - body mechanics

The first part of this project consists of making different poses with a pre-made mesh. The mesh is downloaded from http://www.elevenrig.blogspot.co.uk/. It is a professionally made rig of a character. At this point, animating the character would take way too long, so I'm just experimenting with different poses. Here are the three topics that were given to us and some discription on how I came up with the actual pose.

Despair

One of the tasks was to express despair. There are some key elements here worth noting. When you feel despair, your body crooks - you aren't in a confident body language position. That's why the back is arching. Next, eyebrows - they are supposed to be lifting up towards the centre of the face, since that gives the 'sad puppy' look. It expresses sadness. Next, the hands in front of the body - this acts as a barricade, meaning the person is feeling un-confident. Some body language theory right there! Feet are pointing inwards, which means the same thing. All in all, when combined, the person looks saddened. I played around with the lightning too, to add some more intensity to the scene. I also took three different photos from different angles to experiment with the screenshots and how well will they work in the end. One more thing to note, is that the body should never be symmetrical - that's what I aimed at too. You can see the legs and hands are different on each side.

First thing's first - figuring how on earth to control this thing. It comes as no surprise, that I've never played around with such a complex rig. There are so many options and ways, makes you wonder where to start. I decided to make a GIF (on the right), so you can see how many joins and options there are. After playing around for a good two hours, I decided to start working towards my first task - despair.

joy

Next way joy. So how does a person behave when happy? Well, for starters, he can't stay in one place. He keeps moving. That's the main idea behind the jump. Fists up high in the air means accomplishment, which is a feeling of joy as well. I played around with the shadows once again (the one on the left being my favourite). I feel really confident about this pose to be honest. The huge smile is self-explanatory. People laugh and smile when they're happy. Eyebrows are not going upwards towards the centre of the forehead anymore - they are evening out there instead. This pose was surprisingly way easier to make as well - guess I'm a person of positive feelings?

Anger

Last bit - anger. I wanted to make things a bit more dramatic, so I decided to spotlight the result. The pose is pretty general - pointing a finger, assuming the character is blaming someone. The other hand is put into a fist, which adds more to the feeling. The pose is confident but threatening - the chest is put forwards, one leg back. The shadow on the first picture (the one on the left) is what I really loved. It almost feels like this is some sort of an actor that's angry at the people shooting. I put some red eyes on the model as well, since it adds more to the anger feeling. Generally, red and firey colors are a great choice for anger.

Generally it felt like a very easy task. Took me about 35 minutes for the despair scene, since it was a first time experimenting with such a complicated rig. The next ones took way less - 10 minutes for joy and about 20 minutes for the angry pose (mostly due to the time I needed to set up all the lights, etc). As easy as it was, I think this exercise was extremely useful and totally worth it. It gave me an idea on how exactly to position each limb, and how to think about setting up everything. I also learnt never to make a model symmetrical. It's called 'tween'.

animation n2 - weight shift

The second piece we were supposed to make is called "weight shifting". It's important to note, that the human body is almost never symetrical, so a common pose is the "weight on one leg" pose. What it means, is that the centre of the body weight falls on one of the two legs, rather than in the middle.

As you can see in the picture on the left, the weight centre is a pretty complex thing. To make the animation fluid, one must study how it works first. After collecting some reference, I was ready to give it a go!

Here's my attempt. If I was to remake it, I would've probably slowed it down a bit, since it looks way too quick at the moment. While it's true that animations are better off fast, I'd rather aim at real life speed.

Result

animation n1 - head turn

Even to an animation as simple as this, things are way more complex than they look. First thing to note, is that the head shouldn't just move in a straight line - there should rather be a slope down in the middle. It goes down a bit, then back up again. That way, it doesn't look so robotic. The next thing - eye leading. It's important to understand how the eyes work - they don't move smoothly like the rest of our body. Instead, they make quick and snappy movements, and stay fixed on where our head will turn to ahead of time. Another important note - blinking. Whenever we re-focus, we normally blink. This is for the eye to re-adjust itself to the new object of interest. Another reason is the ton of needless information our eyes can easily miss on. When we're turning our heads, we see a lot of things we don't need to see - the eye is smart and simply wishes to ignore all that information. Time to gather some reference and give it a try myself!

Result

animation n3 - weight lifting

Third animation - heavy box lifting. So far, the most complex animation, because it's A) Longer and B) Requires all joins to move. I'm pretty sure this will take me way more time to make, but it'll be worth it in the end.

Result

The one thing I'd change if I had more time, would be the speed. At the moment, the character moves at the same pace throughout the animation, while in reality, he should only slow down once the box is picked. The first part of the animation should be way faster.

11 seconds animation

key poses

The rig and the sound files belong to the Eleven Second Club (http://www.11secondclub.com/). I first chose a file from there, to make an animation. I'll try to make it a bit more challanging on myself, by having a file with voice.

First thing's first - I needed a plan. Some key poses with which to work. I quickly scratched some, since I didn't want them to be of high quality or anything - they are just concept drawings after all. I didn't have a clean idea on how to add the tweening technique to that as well, so I decided I'd do that while animating.

I wanted some really exaggerated poses, especially with the hand movements. The bird flapping fits perfectly with the audio, and is my favourite part. It was really complex to think of how the body mechanic works while doing something you rarely see - I had to do that motion many times before I got the hang of what moves where and when. After some more experimenting, here's the result.

If I have to be very honest, I don't think this project was one of my strong suits. I am not a big fan of the animating aspects of the industry, which demotivated me at times. As for the animation - I feel like some parts of it were stronger than others. The bird flapping part was alright, but the part after that (just before "it's dead exciting") is what mostly lacks in this animation. The complete lack of lip syncing doesn't help as well. Also, it's somehow lacking the tweening technique, as most of my key poses aren't exaggerated - something I anticipated in advance, but couldn't prevent. I'm still somehow proud with the result, given the short time we had to work on this project, but I'm pretty sure I could've done way better.