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.

Animating spiderman and Moving a Big Dog

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.

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

Character Design

As part of our assignment as well, we had to create an original character, drawing some facial features and creating a back story for our character. The most interesting is to create the type of character he is. Is he calm and cool? Overconfident and cocky? Highly sarcastic and proud?

In the end, I chose evil and crazy. You will see what I'm talking about. Here are my character references.

This is zancrow from the anime: Fairy tail. Look at how scary looking he is.

This is another one from fairy tail; Gajeel.

This is Zaraki Kenpachi from the anime: Bleach. There are many characters in the anime but he is the only one with an evil smile all the time. He is actually good but looks evil. 

This one is Alucard from the anime: Hellsing Ultimate. He is the most powerful protagonist ever and he is evil but also good in nature.

So these are my character references.

Head design Sketches

Here are some initial and face sketches of my character

I'm not really good at drawing HUMAN proportions without an image to refer to. I specifically do not like the last image (the one right above) because from other images, I can draw perspective images of my characterer instead of side and front ones. 

I made 1 error when drawing the front and side views. I drew the lines first to roughly pinpoint where the eyes, nose, mouth and chin were. And it turned out horrible. So I drew the front view first, then moved on to drawing the lines and the side view.

Next week, I will probably do the poses for him and the character background for him.

I already thought of a name: Malkrath!

Body design

Here are some referenced poses from the 4 characters.

See how the 2 poses above look very identical, indicating a very overconfident, powerful character.

The last two above were my inspiration for my character. The 2 poses are from Ryu Hayabusa from Ninja Gaiden 2.

Body design Sketches

Now are my sketches of the body poses.

I am still not good at drawing my human characters so I use reference. Some I come up on my own.

Since pictures do not describe much of my character, here are some insight as to the background of my character.

Characterization

1.    Fill in these basic details:

NAME, TAGLINE, and a BRIEF INTRODUCTION to your character.

Malkrath.

“I’m looking for a real fight! Not from some dog shit.”

Malkrath is part of a group whom they named themselves: Immortell. He is 1 of the 10 core group members who desires battles and blood. When he was young, he witnessed his parent’s death infront of him. The person who founded the group took Malkrath under his care and trained him under his guidance. With self training as well, he has become a force to reckon with and he believes that nobody in the world is superior to him. He has faced many challenges; assassin’s sent by the one responsible for his parent’s death and has overcome them all in blood.

2.   All characters are created for a purpose. This purpose is to tell a story. Briefly describe the story that your character takes part in. You don’t need to go into great detail.

A young man has made a name for himself in the world of magic. He has witnessed his parent’s death at a young age and has taken it up upon himself to surpass his weak self and turn himself into the most powerful magic sword wielder in the world. Initiating into a group called “Immortell”, under the person he looked after him when his parent’s were killed; he strove hard and sparred everyday to become the best. He has killed many to get to where he is and will continue to do so to find out his parent’s murderer. His name: Malkrath.

3.    What is the driving force of your character – what motivates them? This gives a key to their character. Darth Vader is motivated by his desire to crush the Rebel Alliance, while Jack Bauer is motivated to protect his country from whatever dangers threaten it.

Malkrath is driven by his blood lust and seeks only to fight the strongest of the strongest. And deep down in his heart, he also wants to find his parent’s murderer.

4.   What traits are unique to your character – in other words, what makes them different, and stand out from, all other characters that have ever been created? Give at least 3 appearance-based trailts, and 3 behavioural traits. For

Appearance:

1) Malkrath’s most noticeable feature is his evil grin that never goes away.

2) Another feature is his scar on his face that crosses his left eye.

Behaviour:

1) Malkrath is always ready and willing to get involved in any fight so he jumps in relentlessly and let his body and reflexes take care of the rest.

2) He walks with overconfidence and zealousness. He believes to be one of the most powerful magic / equip users ever and in actual fact, he is.

3) He serves no one, other than the man who saved him when he was a young boy. He looks down on a lot of people but treats his group with respect they deserves for they are as powerful as he is.

5.  Write a short dialogue sequence between your character and another person. The dialogue should illuminate some part of your character’s personality.

(Malkrath walks along a road and is ambushed by another magic group, “Cyrans”)

Cyran Leader: “We have to kill you, Malkrath! Under our master’s orders!”

(20 people charge in and fighting ensues)

(5 minutes later)

Cyran Leader: “*panting* How is it possible? You have not a scratch.”

Malkrath: “Is that all? Is that all your pathetic group’s got? Your “ambush” attack was merely a warmup!”

(Malkrath takes his sword and stabs him mercilessly)