Struck Animation Poses

Using the video reference I made, I drew the poses that I will be transferring into Maya. I have drawn only the front view poses, as I felt drawing any more views was a bit over kill considering I will be using the video for reference most of the time, as I can see the actual weight of movements there instead of just an idle pose-to-pose. That being said, I think this pose drawing will help to start out the process of making the animation in 3D within Maya.

Like the other pose drawings I have created, this one also has the joint positions dotted in black to help orientate my character when working in 3D, as well as showing the curve of the spine - one of the more important things to keep consistent throughout my animations as to keep the idea of this character being old and poorly postured in mind.

Struck Animation Video Reference

For my fourth animation I am producing a movement of my character being struck in the upper right torso, or  shoulder. In the storyboard my team has created we have the demon attacking the mage with a kick. The demon is somewhat taller than the mage, especially considering his posture, so I thought it would make it interesting if he tried to disarm the mage from his staff by attacking the arm that carries it, and therefore the right shoulder area.

It was difficult trying to find secondary research of such an action, with only one in mind in Lord of the Rings, a scene where Gandalf is in combat with Saruman. Here is a link to the video of the fight:

http://youtu.be/p1Vyhve9gtg?t=2m20s

The fight isn't exactly showing what I imagine my animation to be, but it does give a good representation of what being struck whilst holding a staff it like, which is good for implementing weight and its affect on movements is like.

With that being said, here is my own primary research, a video reference I made of myself acting out my ideas. It's fairly long, but I tried to get all four directions/views recorded for best reference. I did cut it down, but when rendering out the video it produced black spots in the video.

Primary Video research/reference:

Next, like the other animations I made, I'll be drawing out the poses of this animation using the video as reference, which I will then take into Maya for 3D animation.

Attack Animation Final, Reflection on Animation

I've managed to make the animation a little smoother since my last post, by editing the tangents of attributes in the graph editor. I have also added facial animation too. I decided with the facial animation that I didn't want something too extreme, as although this is unlikely to be a looped animation (which I have set it so it can be) I still didn't want it to have too extreme of a facial animation that the audience might not believe it.

I have taken into consideration as many of the principles of animation that I could apply to this animation; timing and spacing, anticipation, arcs, eases, exaggeration, appeal, follow through and overlapping actions, and I think that with them in mind I have managed to produce a solid attack animation.

I think given more time to work on this animation I would allow for more overlapping movements on his legs, but I've come to realise that with the movement I am animating, creating an overlapping movement on the legs is quite difficult because realistically when we attack like that both of the legs tend to move in unison to allow the stretch/reach of the torso and hips. So if I could I would overlap or make them follow through a bit more, but realistically I'm not sure I could do so whilst keeping believability.

Here is my final animation, with views in several orthographic modes as well as perspective and a custom camera set up I made to allow the camera to stay with the head movement in order to show the facial animation.

Attack Animation Playblast

I have almost completed my attack animation, with only a few tweaks to make for smoother movement as well as facial animation for it.

Here is what I have so far:

Gimbal Lock

Whilst working on the attack animation I came up against gimbal lock. I've never really had too much of a problem with it, but here it completely destroyed the movement of my staff. From the images below you can see what gimbal lock looks like with the focus on tangents. The staff solving inverse kinematics are solving incorrectly because of gimbal lock, and so to remove it I had to use a tool called 'Euler Filter'. I selected the problematic tangents and then used Euler Filter.

From this second image you can see the tangents have now been solved and they curve smoothly, with the staff's inverse kinematics solving as they should do to create a smooth arcing animation.

Rigging Set-up Revised

I began animating the attack and realised immediately that there was something wrong in the way the inverse kinematics were solving their movement from point A to B with rotation including for the staff. To elaborate; when I animated the swing of the staff for the attack, the frames between the first and second keys caused the arms to move erratically and stray away from actually holding the staff (they would just fly off and come back at the last frame). I spent quite some time trying to figure out why this was happening, after trying things such as removing the right hand's constraints and trying to animate it to follow the staff, which produced poor results, I finally figured out how to correct my issue. The problem was, I eventually found, was that the way I altered the rig so that the hands moved with the staff was incorrect, or rather not done to fine detail; I had made the groups which controlled the hand movements in a way so that their hierarchy didn't control the rotation the way I wanted, and that the pivot points of the actual groupings were incorrectly placed. It is something that has wasted a fair amount of my time, but also something that I have learnt from the hard way and will make sure to never do again. 

Here is what was happening:

The first two images are the start and end of the key frame points, A and B. The rest of the frames are how the rig modifications I added for the staff I spoke about created movement between point A and B. The solving of the inverse kinematics using that set up were terrible.

Here is the latest revision of the rig, which I have tested multiple times with different parameters to make sure it will work, and everything seems to be working to what I had expected the first rig to accomplish:

Here you can see the hierarchy of my new rig set-up. I used a locator to place where I wanted my group's pivot points to be and then created the groups, placed the hand controllers into the group and then snapped their pivot to the locator. I then created a curve controller using the EP Curve Tool and traced around a polygon square, then deleted the polygon square so only the curve remained. I snapped the new curve controller to the locator position, then deleted the locator so that all the pivots of the hands, staff, group and curve controller were in the exact same place as where the locator was.

Here you can see the final result, I have the newly made Staff_Controller at the top of the hierarchy.

Now the issues you saw before, with the erratic movement between frame A and B are no longer there, and it moves as intended between frames.

Game Animation in Mind

I had been doing my attack animation for a while now, and then came back to it the next day with fresh eyes. What I realised when I returned to my animation is that I had been creating it to the detail of the reference video I made. This wouldn't have been bad if it were not intended for games, because it had a loop of body movement before the actual attack just like my references, however this is for games, so if this were to be placed in game and a player told his character to attack, he would see his character moving about for a second or so before actually carrying out the attack command. This isn't acceptable except for maybe some circumstances where the character builds up his attack.

I am now starting over so that the attack is carried out immediately.

Attack Rigging Problem

For the attack animation I have proposed, I am going to use inverse kinematics on the arms as so they keep their place without problems when holding the staff; I see forward kinematics causing problems with not being able to hold their position when I animate the torso of the character. The problem I have encountered is figuring out how to rig the staff so that both the hands keep their position on the staff when moving around.

Below is an image of the Outliner, showing the hierarchy of the grouping and parenting that I made which resolves my issue. To do this I created a 'Staff_Grp' and placed the left hand controller and staff into it, so the left hand is now controlled by the Staff_Grp's translation and orientation. I then made the group 'Staff_Hands_Grp' and placed the Staff_Grp in there, so now the Staff_Grp, staff and left hand are controlled by the Staff_Hands_Grp group. I then parented this all to the orientation and translation of the right hand's controller, so that however I move the right hand/arm, the staff and left hand/arm follow its lead and therefore keep both hands on the staff at all times. You might think this reduces the ability to move the arms freely, however this rig allows me to control the elbow with a different controller, and therefore I can control them uniquely as so to not produce a twinning action, but still control them together if I want to.

Facial Animation for Run Cycle, Run Cycle Complete

I have finished my facial animation for the run cycle of my character. I aimed to show him breathing heavy and fast, just as you probably would when running for an extended period of time, but I have also aimed to show him angry or rather him having the intention to charge an enemy, and as so has a facial expression that shows him wanting to attack something or someone.

Here is the facial animation:

The loop is only 19 frames long. I believe for the overall animation I have managed to apply good animation principles to produce a believable and appealing result. However, 19 frames is difficult to fit in facial animation that accurately and finely conveys what I character is portraying. That being said, I think the audience that watches this facial animation can understand those points, even though it only has a short amount of time to represent them.

I also recognise that because it is such a short loop, any big or noticeable actions will be repeated over and over, and therefore become obvious that it is a loop which is not really what you aim for in game animation. So I made a facial animation that looks as if it should be looped, with the character taking heavy breaths and looking angry in them too.

Here is my final run cycle animation as seen from multiple angles. I believe the body movement and facial expression compliment each other and show a good amount of exaggeration and secondary action, among the other principles of animation that I have applied.