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.