It
has been such a long time since I posted up anything game related. Lately it
has all been about work, work and work. Finally, there are some interesting
videos to show you.
Also,
I have been lately watching a lot of fighting game videos. Being an FPS and RPG
fan boy, I shunned a lot of fighting games. But recently, I am beginning to love
it.
There’s this guy by the name of miles923 on youtube who
does mainly fighting game tutorials. I’ve been watching
mainly his ultimate marvel vs capcom videos and with Street Fighter X Tekken
coming out soon, he has already given tips and tutorials on how to play it.
Final week of 3D Visualization and Animation is here!
Our assignment was to do a walk cycle of a human body. It has to be accurate and imitate to that of a real human body. Thinking about it, I must think a lot of things when walking; how our hands, legs, body and spine move. We naturally cannot keep a straight spinal line so it is bent forward a lot of times. Our hands would sometimes move inward when walking (unlike my animation which just show my hands moving forward and backward when walking).
Thinking of the body when it moves, it moves down when the leg touches the floor and moves up when the other leg is going to touch the floor. It's hard to explain so here is my video and the references I used for my assignment.
References:
See what I mean. The fourth pose is at the highest when the left leg is about to touch the ground while the right is pushing up the body.
Reflection:
I guess what I learned during this assignment is that there is no easy way out and attention to detail is very important.
For the first part, I had to manually move the person's legs and body constantly at every frame. Although it is very time consuming, I get better at doing it. After a few adjustments, I know where the legs and the body positions should be.
Motion trails are a great way to see where the body positions are. I did all the objects manually so there are bound to be some mistakes so I used the motion trail to adjust further.
So this week's exercise is about animation and animating a living object is harder than that of an in-animatie object.
This is spider man's weight shift: Moving his hips.
About the texture, when I transferred the one I did in school with the texture and I transferred it to my laptop, it was unable to give me the skin texture. But what's more important is that you see the animation of the hip mainly (swaying from right to left). So here it is.
Reflection
What I learned is that poses are known as extremes. Bending the pose too much will be too extreme so there is a limit to it. There must be ease in and ease out of each action. Living things are not robots so we cannot do every action smoothly. There must be some actions we do very fast and very slow.
Another thing I learned is anticipation. When we do actions, others should anticipate what we are about to do. For example, the spider man weight shift. The feet are facing a certain direction when the weight is exerted on 1 foot. When the weight changes to the other leg, the feet changes direction accordingly. 1 foot will relax while the other will try to take the weight of the body.
Big Dog
We are supposed to animate this dog when it is falling down. What the movements and actions it is doing when it is falling down and how it managed to get up.
Exercise 1:
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.
Ans: One step: Front-left lifts up
while back-right moves forward -> Front-right lifts up while back-left moves
forward -> *repeats*
ii)Explain how this sequence of movements manages
to balance BigDog’s body weight.
Ans: This
sequence of movements helps because the center of gravity is kept in the center
of the dog. If the front left and front right were to move forward at the same
time, the center would be near the head and that would probably destabilize the
dog.
iii)Look at BigDog_kick_slow_motion.mov. Draw a
storyboard of BigDog stabilising itself after being kicked.
Exercise 2:
So this is my playblast aka my video of the big dog animation.
My thoughts:
This is about watching the original video very carefully and then applying it to the rig. The thing I struggle is that when I animate, I keep the number of frames at a constant number like 1 movement equals to 12 frames. Well, in animation, I have to be flexible and change the number of frames and cannot keep it at a constant number.
Watching the original video, it is quite hard to get the directions properly. When it spreads it's front legs, the body must face down and when it's back legs are spread out, the body must face up, giving the "dog" a bounce and some life; unlike when the body is just moving left constantly without rotating anything.
I had to ease out the animation as well. My previous animation showed the dog in its standing up position at the last frame without giving it extra frames for easing out so I added that.
Another thing is that in the graph editor, when rotating and translating, most of the lines cannot be straight. There must be some sort of bend to make it look more exciting.
