Assignment Walk Cycle

Rigging Poses

Rigging Exercise & Poses:

Let me start with a personal note: This exercise should be given more time and training put into it. Because rigging is quite a big component, we only had 1 week to finish it. Moreover, after following the tutorial, many aspects of this component have not been covered.

Learning Outcomes:
We started off building the skeleton with the joint tool and then moved on to put IK handles on the model. All these are simple. Soon, we moved on to the part where we give the feet and fingers attributes - although this is tedious, I found it much entertaining and easy.

During the initial stages where we had to orient the joints, I didn't do that part properly, when I skinned my model and tried to orient the backbone, my model did not behave properly and I had to orient my model again.

Moving on, after skinning the model, the hardest part was up ahead. The weight painting, it is not only difficult but you have to have a good sense of imagination and knowledge of the human body.

I've learnt quite a lot from this exercise and the video is really helpful for rigging beginners.







Pose 1



Pose 2

Pose 3

Big Dog Animation

In this exercise, we are to animate a "Big Dog" when it is kicked from the side - and to show the actions of it losing its balance and trying to regain it.

i) If engineered or programmed badly, BigDog would fall over. Watch the full video again, and describe how BigDog’s legs move while walking– ie. what is the sequence of leg movements for one complete step? Use the terms BL, BR, FL, and FR for the back-left, back-right, front-left and front-right legs.

The legs that move at the same time will always be diagonal to each other. For example, the FL and BR leg will move then the FR and BL leg will move. Thus its : FL and BL moves forward, FR and BL moves foward, repeat.

ii) Explain how this sequence of movements manages to balance BigDog’s body weight.

As the center of gravity is at the middle of the dog, if the dog were to use its 2 right legs to stablize itself then it will lose its balance.

iii) Look at BigDog_kick_slow_motion.mov. Draw a storyboard of BigDog stabilising itself after being kicked.

Reflection:

When attempting this exercise, I applied all the principles that I stated in the post below (Spiderman weight shift). I found this exercise to be simpler than the spiderman weight shifting. I had to use ease in and ease out to give a sense of impact when the dog was kicked and when it tries to regain its balance.

Also, I had to stretch some parts of the timelime to be longer.

Lastly, I edited the graph editor to give it more life. The middle part where the dog almost lost its balance.

Spiderman Weight Shift

Animating Spiderman.

The video above shows an animation of spiderman weight shifting.

In this exercise, we learnt how to do the basic 3 steps of layering.

1. Key Poses

2. Stretching the timeline

3. Graph Editor.

By obeying these 3 steps, we can create animation that is Pose-to-Pose instead of straight ahead.

Straight ahead method is not good because if the animation is not well done and needs editing in the middle of the animation, the animator will have to redo the entire animation. However, when using pose-to-pose, if the animator needs to do editing, he can just edit the key poses.

From there however, after all the key poses are done nicely, the animator can proceed to do the detailed straight ahead method to make the animation more realistic. But that is only good when your key poses are already solid.

Reflection:

In this animation, we learnt basically 2 things. Ease-in ease-out and anticipating.

Without ease in and ease out, the animation will look very static. In the lab, our tutor gave a demostration of using 2 balls, 1 with ease in and ease out, 1 with just a normal animation. From there we can see which animation looks more dynamic and realistic. So, we must have some fast actions and some slow actions to make the animation more realistic.

Anticipating is the weight shifting of the model. As spiderman shifts his hips from left to right, the rest of the body must follow in a realistic way. For example, when the spiderman shift his hips, his feet that the weight is not acting on will shift first and then followed by the other feet.