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.