Animation Mentor Demo 1

In my last two classes at AM, I taught animals and creatures and advanced body mechanics. I asked my students to pick a video reference they wanted me to animate for an in class demo. Here is a breakdown of the first. I will post the second shortly.

I told them to find me a 2 second clip showing body mechanics. The class voted on this clip, one of them hunted it down online. They then voted I animate it with Stan, making it slightly more difficult due to proportion challenge. Hmm...next time I don't give them that option! :D

 

Original clip

The original video had even timing so during class I edited it to adjust timing using quicktime. I then also converted it to 12fps so I had less frames to distract me and would not be a slave to the reference.

  

Edited clip 12fps (15 minutes)

I then blocked out the animation during 2 classes talking about my mindset and how I approached the spacing, by favoring the hang time keys and pushing the poses to be more clear. Before class I set up a simple set and put in the first pose. Then blocked using a straight ahead method, a new pose every 6-8 frames. 

 
Blocking pass (75 minutes)

Afterwards, I went back and added a few more breakdowns to achieve the pass you see above. I finished blocking, and turned it into auto-tangent spline and did a couple minutes just working on fk/ik switching and this was the result. 

  

1st spline pass (20 minutes)

I then spent half of the next class polishing it. Starting with a pass using the COG and graph editor making sure his base of movement was smooth, and working outwards to the chest, head and limbs.

  

2nd spline pass (30 minutes)

It was odd to animate and talk about my thought process in each step, and something I had never done before in such detail. I found it to be an interesting challenge. Because it was a short clip and the blocking was detailed enough, the splining was quick and painless, mostly and working on nicer spacing and arcs for the arms and legs.

Hope you enjoyed the clips!