Attack Animation Poses

Here are the fairly solid poses I've taken from my video reference and drawn. The silhouette of them and negative space use in them make the poses strong in my opinion, and so now I can begin to recreate them in 3D and then animate them afterwards.

Taking into considering what I spoke about in my last post, about the over head sweeping attack keeping in character with the old man idea; I hope the arched/haunched spine is proven better in these drawings, and I will probably be exaggerating the poses in 3D too if it calls for it.

Attack Animation

For my third animation I have to create an attack motion, with the mage using his staff as a weapon that could theoretically fire out magic from the attack.

I have looked in a numerous differently locations, such as forums, video hosting sites and even simple google searching for any form of secondary research to help with the creation of this animation, but have come up with no useful results. That being said, I did create primary research just like I have for all my animations so far, by recording what I would imagine a staff attack could look like, whilst bearing in mind the fact that I want my character to still seem relatively old.

I went for an under-sweeping attack, but after play back and analysing the movement that I created, I believe it is too youthful in the sense that I was watching the spine and how it had to bend back fairly rapidly. So instead of using it I went for another approach of having the overhead sweep attack. This way his spine can remain haunched over and therefore retain his old characteristics.

Here are the two attempts, the second video being the one I prefer most and am going to take further:

I also made sure to reference the different orthographic views in this latest video referencing, as the last few I did I only took one or two angles of reference.

Run Animation Reflection

I have yet to do the facial animations for the run animation, however I want to reflect and criticise the work I have done so far because what I have done is the bulk of the animation.

I think my run animation has been fairly successful, in that I believe it is relatively realistic and follows as many  of the 12 principles of animation that I can apply to it. For example I applied anticipation and follow through on the clavicles and hips that correspond to the movements of the arms and legs. I have also applied overlapping actions from the spine into the head rotation. I have applied exaggeration in the balancing of the staff with the use of the left arm and 'weight' applied to the right clavicle. Other than that I have applied arcs wherever possible, and slow in and outs to the movements of the legs, with a secondary action of carrying the staff behind the character with the running of course being the primary action.

I have learnt that, when using IK animation, the graph editor (f-curves) and manipulating its tangents is incredibly powerful and important when it comes to game animation; animation for cinematic use is not on a strict budget as it would be in games, because in game animation you need to make sure you use fewer keys in order to stay on budget with memory restrictions.

In game animation a player can also look around the character, and so you have to make sure the movement and poses are as strong as they can be for all angles, not just the angle a camera will be facing as it is in cinematic use. The player also expects an almost instant response, so the principles of animation have to be relaxed and bent a little bit to allow that to happen. For example when a player presses a button for an attack animation they want to see it carried out instantly, so the anticipation principle is somewhat diminished - but it still needs to be in there.

Going back to my evaluation of my run cycle; I believe I have kept timing in check, the movement of the limbs in conjunction with one another, the floor and the rest of the body is believable and I think it represents my character's background as well as it can be.

I do have some flaws left in the animation that I have noticed after checking it several times; the knees on my character pop a little bit, but I think that is because the animation is set to 20 frames (0-20), but the first and last frame are identical, so in the Time Slider I changed it to 0-19 frames. This stops the 2 identical frames from showing and therefore causing a pause in animation since they both hold the same movement values, but in doing so the legs can carry out the final translation value that going from 19 to 20 would have produce, and therefore cause it to pop back to the first (0) frame. That is only my theory at least, and I would need to look into it a little further.

The left hand also moves quite swiftly at one point in the animation, which takes away quality from the arcing value, however I discovered the only way I could stop this was to implement an extra key frame and extend the animation by a few frames to allow the hand to reach the same location in 3D space with less of a speedy  movement. I didn't want to do this because it took away the animation quality, in the sense that the loop would be increased and may increased the chances of a possible problem when it comes to blending the animations in Trax Editor, and as well as that the extra key is adding to the amount of memory it would need to run the animation. I just feel that the swift hand movement is not enough to justify a less efficient animation cycle, and therefore I chose to leave it in.

At the end of all my animations I hope to go back and be able to polish them a little further, however for this animation I believe not a great deal is needed to do so, arguably if at all.

Run Animation and Its Issues

After drawing the run poses, I took them into Maya and began blocking them out in 3D. I was fairly happy with what I had made so I looked at them in silhouette form to see if they were strong enough to represent the type of character and animation movement I was aiming for. The negative space created by the silhouette was what I was looking for, and I think they looked very good so I then began the process of animating the frames in between the poses.

Silhouette poses from different frames and angles

When animating this character I decided to stick with inverse kinematics (IK) rather than changing to forward kinematics (FK), because I tried to think of all the issues and limits for both type of animating paths and eventually decided that IK would most probably have fewer issues with it. Normally an animator can switch between the two types throughout animating, however since I had applied the staff to this rig which would not normally be there, whenever I switched to FK after alreadying keying frames in IK the staff would simply disappear from the entire scene. So I have come to realise that I need to decide what limb will have what type of movement on it before I delve into animating it.

However, choosing IK still came with its issues that I had to find solutions to. For example, the nice thing about FK is that you have direct control over the rotations and translations of the character's joints, whereas the IK follows a set path which is more often than not a linear path. So keeping in mind the 12 principles of animation, I needed to make the movements arc in order to be believable. This is where the F-curves come in to play and, like in other issues I've shown in my work, manipulating them and their tangents can get great results without having to add extra key frames, which is another factor that needs to be kept in mind; although this work hasn't got a budget and limitations that would normally be given in games as to not take up too much memory, I was still creating an animation that is supposed to be intended for games. So I am trying to create the best results possible with the fewest key frames, and allowing my work with the f-curves to do the bulk of the animation.

Here is another issue I had with my animation, the elbow was wobbling or 'popping' back and forth suddenly at the beginning of the loop. It looked unnatural and certainly made arcing a problem. 

                                                    

Popping problem

Popping resolved

I resolved this issue using just the curves and their corresponding tangents. The movement is now a relatively smooth arc, with a quicker movement on some key frames where you'd expect the arm to do so when the torso and shoulders and moving up and down in a quick manner.

Final Storyboard

Here is the final version of our storyboard. The use of cameras is fairly important in our animation since we want combat but without having to have two characters interact on screen. The writing on our storyboard details the way we will use camera movements, as well as what character does what animation in each scene.

Run Animation posing

For the running animation, to better see the blocked out poses I need for it, I took the video recording reference that I made a few weeks ago, and drew the strongest poses I could see that looped just like a run cycle should.

It is hard to tell from the drawings, but the character is moving relatively fast to say he is portrayed as being old. With him being old, the posture of his run needed to still be bent over and somewhat lopsided not only because of his age but also because of him carrying the staff whilst running.

The staff will be held backwards throughout the run as for him to not trip on it and get to also get a better range of motion for his right leg. His right arm that holds the staff will move back and forth however, just never in front of himself. To counter act this movement and to keep him physically looking balanced and able to perform his run, the left arm has to be used quite a bit. From the reference and keeping in mind the principle of exaggeration and arcs, I made his arm move in a clockwise motion. Normally when running a person will move the arm back and forth in an arcing motion, but for this type of movement to be balance I needed his arm to come up, back, down and forward. It is slightly difficult to see from the 2D drawing, but hopefully looking at the video reference again you can see what I am describing. (Best shown at 33 seconds onwards).

Idle Animation Final

I've made a video of different angles for the final version of my idle animation. When looking at my animation through different views I can see a few annoyances in the animation that could cause it to not look as believable as it could be. For example the left arm, on return to the body, seems to stop for a single frame. It is not too noticeable, however it ruins the smooth arcing of the arm's movement and makes it look as if it is 'popping' at times. When I have completed the rest of my animations I hope to go back and correct this problem.

Storyboards

As part of secondary research for our team's animations, we looked at a trailer for the game 'Guardians of Middle-Earth', and how they used their camera movements and character movements.

                                              

                                                      (http://youtu.be/ruLML8axv4Y?t=46s)

We took that for inspiration and then made a number of different storyboards between us, here is my version:

                                                   
We have also made a 'final' version which I will post soon, but although it is final we agreed that whilst creating our animations certain things might need to be changed, added or removed to make sure it works for both our artistic and technical limits.

Facial Animation

For the facial animation for this character I began by working on the jaw, as I imagine breathing relatively heavily would cause the jaw to be the main focus of movement.

Below is just an image of how I set up the jaw rotation tangents; at first I had the tangents set to spline, but i needed the mouth to open in a linear fashion with no slowing or speeding up. After that I wanted the mouth to close at a slower rate. For this to work I set the first key to have a linear out and the second key to have an edited spline out.

I then worked on the lips and cheeks, making them inflate, deflate and constrict at the right times. The eyelids eyebrows were next.

Here is the facial expression so far. I am happy with it at the moment and don't think I'll need to change a lot, but feedback might change this.

Ease In and Out Principle

I have almost completed my character's idle animation now, all I have yet to do is apply facial animation. What I did notice about the staff movement is that at the start and end of the loop it moves rather quickly from one position to another. I moved the placement of the keys and angles of tangents to allow it to loop in a smooth fashion, whilst keeping in mind the overlapping action between the staff and arm / body movement.

I also used the pre-infinity and post-infinity tool to see how the end and start keys/tangents worked together, I've noticed it helps a great deal to understand how your tangents act on the animation when it is made for looping, as idle, walk, run etc. animations do.

Here is the process and result:

Staff Animation issue resolved

After solving the staff planting problem, I realised that just having the arm as IK and the staff parented to the arm controller didn't fully resolve my problem for the way I want the animation to work. I intend the staff to sway from side to side whilst the body moves back and forth; the staff at the moment can only rotate from the wrist location, and so although it doesn't move up and down any more it still moves out of place at the bottom when I rotate it.

To allow it to move side to side whilst the bottom remains in place, I selected the rig's arm control at the wrist and changed its centre pivot to be placed at the bottom of the staff by snapping it to the staff's bottom most polygon. You can see the results below. This set up only works for this particular animation - once I start on my other animations I will set the pivot back in place with the wrist.

Pivot at the wrist.

Pivot at the bottom of the staff.

FK IK Problem Solved

After a few hours spent trying to find a simple solution to keep the staff planted in the same place, but whilst still keeping the right arm in FK mode, I had found no solutions and therefore thought it best to just try and switch to IK for this particular animation where keeping it planted is important. To do this I had to un-parent the staff from the wrist control, delete all the animation keys for the wrist, hand/fingers, elbow, shoulder and clavicle. I could then set the FK to IK on the arm, reposition it to look as if it were holding the staff, and the re-parent the staff to the wrist.

Here is the video:

As you can see the staff now remains in place throughout the animation; the body no longer effects its chain of movement down the bone hierarchy.

FK / IK Problems

For my character's left arm I have used inverse kinematics, and when it comes to keeping its place in 3d space it is incredible useful because the hand stays planted where it is. IK doesn't give you as much exact freedom as forward kinematics because with FK you can change the angle of a movement by however small increments you want, whereas with IK you need to set the keys, and then try to tweak the graph editor in order to produce the type of movement you need.

I had the characters right arm, which is holding the staff, set to FK so that I am able to control it's exact movement. The trouble with this is that it does not stay planted when the body moves, and therefore to try and keep the staff planted in the same place seems near impossible at the moment due to the body moving its location. Below is a quick video of what I mean; during the movement of the body the FK arm moves, and so is causing problems.

The video is quite short because it is not on a loop, but for the first few frames I have tried to correct the FK movement of the staff, but after that you can see what the problem looks like when the staff starts to move with the motion of the body, because unlike the IK left arm it is not planted.

When trying to resolve this problem I used the graph editor to change the tangents of the keys, hoping that they would help keep the staff in place. They were set to spline in and out, so I changed them to linear going out of the problematic keys and into the next key, which helped a fair amount, but I was still seeing a lot of jerking from the arm and would only have been a temporary fix, as next time I manipulated the staff I would have to do it yet again and spending hours trying to fix such a small problem is a waste of time.

Motion Trails

When animating I have tried to keep in mind the 12 principles of animation, so when it came to animating the left arm, which has IK on it, I wanted to make sure it was moving in a smooth life-like arc. To do this I used Maya's Editable Motion Trail tool. This creates and editable path of where the selected object moves. The tool only plots editable points for where keys are placed for that particular object, but it also plots the arcing path in between the set keys. When I first looked I noticed that the arc was quite sharp in one area, which isn't how humans naturally move, so I selected the key point in the trail and manipulated it until it was following a smooth arc, but also kept with the initial pose idea.

Sharp arc between they key of 6, 12 and 14.

After manipulating the trail so that it has a more smooth arcing path.

Silhouette Check

I turned the lighting off inside Maya to check the silhouettes to see if they represent strong poses. I think they are strong enough to portray what I'm trying to convey to the audience; the character is fairly old, with a poor posture and dangling limbs.

Idle Pose update

After creating those videos for a revised pose of the idle, I drew some main poses that I'll now be recreating in Maya, and then finally applying as many of the 12 principles of animation that I can for the full idle animation.

Character Reference

I was looking for video reference on walking with the characteristics of an old man, but I failed to find any of good enough quality, so I made another recording of myself trying to act out what I imagine the old mage would look like. I'm going to work on drawing the poses for him again now I've made the references, which I'll post a little later on.

Hopefully in the videos you can see that I am wanting to give my character a bent posture, with a bit of a hobble for his walk/run, hopefully showing that the character will need to put effort into his motions, to overcome his ageing body's aches and pains.

Mage Idle / Breathe

                                                                 Mage Walk / Run

Character Research

With the thoughts on the type of character I have in mind to use for the mage animations, I took a few images found from the internet for references whilst redrawing the idle pose.

Character background

I took advice from my lecturer and have thought of a simple background story to apply to my character:

He is a fairly old wizard, one capable of great spells and power, but who's age shows in his movement; his walks are hobbled and his posture is poor. Although he is old and looks frail, he can run and keep up with the rest of the character's, but his runs looks poorly balanced and as if he needs to put a lot of effort to ignore the pains from his aching body.

As an example of this, I was looking at the cinematic trailer for the first World of Warcraft game, and specifically when you see the undead character enter the scene as you can watch below at 1 minute and 50 seconds in:

(here is the link for the video starting at exact time if you don't want to fast forward: http://youtu.be/dYK_Gqyf48Y?t=1m51s)

Reflective Writing 02

After speaking with my lecturer about my idle pose and its form in Maya so far, she made me realise that my mage character needs a bit more of a background in order for me to understand how it would move and go about doing the movements for the animations I am wanting to do.

At the moment my character is somewhat of a generic hero, which makes its animations harder to pin down and really put forward his characteristics to the audience. A character's personality adds to the influence of its animations and poses.

So with that in mind I plan on recreating my idle pose so that it portrays an old character, a wise wizard of sorts, whose body is aged and diminished, therefore forcing him to maybe walk and run with a hobble or off balance motion, with a poor posture / bent back. I will find a few references for such ideas.

Idle Pose in Maya

I took the poses and reference I made for the idle pose and posed it out in Maya. I wasn't worrying about timing, transitions, etc. yet, I just needed to pose the character and see what it looks in a 3D perspective, as well as looking at it's silhouette in both the perspective view and multiple orthographic views.

Idle Pose Referencing

             The idle pose I imagined using was the character slightly swaying his body and staff in opposite timing/direction, with him picking up the staff with two hands every now and then with a head turn that shows him looking around his environment. I figured the best way to reference what I specifically wanted to do was to record myself doing so. Here is a video of me trying to do the movements I just described. The actions are subtle, with a secondary action that is not so subtle, such as the head turn and staff switching from one hand to two hands.

You get a general idea of what I am aiming to deliver. I have drawn a pose-to-pose illustration of what I am aiming for using the video I made as a reference. I need to talk with my team and lecturer about frame limits, to make sure the idle is able to have a long enough frame span to include all the movements I am proposing.

Here is the pose-to-pose illustration:

Brief so far

                       The team has an overall brief and direction for the animation; all of hour characters have their separate animations, all of which include at least one form of attack. We will be using this along side creative camera placements and movements to allow it to appear as if our characters are fighting along side one another, fighting their enemy. For example, when an attack animation is played, the camera could be placed directly in front of the character and their weapon so that it looks as if the camera has the perspective of the enemy, and similar work can be done for when our characters take hits and stumble.

My character's animations are 'Idle', 'Run', 'Cast' (a mage attack) and 'Stumble' as if being hit. His actions in terms of a storyboard will be him idling as if he is waiting with his companions, then he starts running towards an enemy, stops to do a powerful cast, takes an enemy hit to the chest/shoulders where he will stumble, possibly cast again and then return to the idle animation. The specifics are still being worked out, because it will have to work well with how we propose to set up the interaction and camera work with my teams' characters.

The animations themselves will have relatively little anticipation because these are animations made for a gaming environment, and so a player expects almost immediate animations and reactions to their pressing of control buttons.