Reflective writing 01

                    For the first week of this module I wasn't able to make it into the lectures, so I missed out on the part where we formed teams for our animation assignment. Thankfully this week I was able to join a preexisting team that had someone who was interested in animation much like myself, which is good to know that there will definitely be someone else who is hopefully equally as enthusiastic about it as I am.

After talking with them and getting caught up with their plans and tasks they set themselves we started looking at the storyboard they had created. It had a lot of narrative, which is good, however for the module there were a certain number of things we had to do in order to gain marks for grades. With that in mind we decided to simplify what they had previously wanted to do so that it coordinates with what is expected of us in order to complete this module. We decided that the narrative of the animations should be in place after we had created the animations themselves. We assigned a character for each of us, mine being a mage-like character, and decided on what type of animations we would create for each of them.  The brief said we are to create 4 animations each so i chose to do running, casting a spell, stumble (as in hit by an enemy) and an idle/breathe animation. The idle/breathe animation i think is required by the module regardless of what else we are wanting to do and so i am not sure if it is 4 animations plus an idle/breathe or if we actually count that as 1 of the 4 already - it is something I will have to bring up next time we meet.

Accepting me as a fourth team member could have caused a bit of havoc with their plans, but thankfully it seemed as if the team needed to change their plans in order for it to adhere to the module handbook anyway, so joining them wasn't too much of a burden. I look forward to working with them, as we all seem to have good ideas and aim for gaining extra credit by including digital effects using After Effects and applying narrative to the animations which aren't necessary but will improve quality and hopefully overall grades.

Breathe Cycle 01

                   For my breathe cycle I began with thoughts of the character being fairly out of breathe from moving around a lot and interacting with it's environment, as if this is for a game then there wont be many points were the character isn't constantly moving. This made me create the animation with exaggerated breathing movement, as one of the principles of animation is to exaggerate your movements and poses to better allow the player or viewer to understand the character.

I began by moving, posing and setting a key at frame 01 for where i would imagine the cycle pose to begin and end. I chose it to be the pinnacle of the breathing inwards, and so the character would be expanding its stomach and chest, and arching its spine and shoulders / clavicles. I then selected all the control curves, middle click and dragged on frame one to 24 then saved a key there so that both the 24th and 1st frame shared the same values. Then I moved to the 12th frame and posed out the outward breath. I set the tangent type to spline so that the frames eased in and out of their values, better creating an arc from one pose to another because humans move in arcs rather than in a linear fashion such as mechanical or robotic things.

I noticed the arms of my character were twinning their movements, so i changed one of them to have a greater follow through. I rotated all the spine controls together so they 'compressed' the chest and skull to simulate breathing outwards, I noticed that it wasn't quite looking natural though because they all moved at the same time. So i moved their keyframes one or two apart from each other to allow them to overlap one another.

After tweaking the movements I noticed the transition from frame 24 to frame 01 was jerking, I discovered it was because the out tangent for frame 1 and the in tangent for frame 24 were very sharp in their angles. To smooth them out and allow a proper transition between the start and end of the cycle i selected the tangents and set the respective in and out values to flat tangents.

Spline Tangent

Flat Tangent

I noticed that the whole animation was just a few frames too fast for breathing naturally, even if they were exaggerated motions. To remedy this all i did was place a few frames in between set poses, thus extending the time that character had to move into position.

As another way to find errors in the animation i turned off the lighting to see only the silhouette. In doing so I noticed the character's left elbow stayed fairly rigid throughout the whole animation, so I went back into the animation and gave it rotations.

Here is a playblast of the animation so far: