Struck Animation Final, Reflection on the Animation

For the struck animation I made a final revision by reducing the inbetween frames of the last 2 key frames so that the arm swings back more quickly, as it would do so naturally unless for some reason the character was using their muscles to slow its rotation.

When creating this animation I repeatedly reminded myself of the 12 principles of animation and did as much as I could to implement them where possible. For example if you watch the character's movement immediately after being hit near the shoulder, I have shown follow through and overlapping actions of the shoulders and rotation starting from the clavicles down to the hips. I've tried to make the animation as appealing as possible, with use of exaggeration of it's movement. The staff, hands, legs and most of the other body parts are following an arcing path, with the ease in and out technique being used to provide a more believable animation.

The weight of the character was also taken into account, and can be seen when pushing himself back up using the staff. You can see the weight being handled first by the shoulders and then the spine. After recovery the character has been made to look weak or fragile, and so his movement is a struggle.

What I would have done different:
If I were to do this again I would like to further look into the problems I've had with pivoting issues on the staff/rig. I heavily implemented the use of the graph editor in order to control the rotation and translation of the staff seeing as it's pivot was at the right wrist joint rather than at the bottom of the staff; if the pivot was at the bottom of the staff then I could have controlled its rotation and translation on the floor to stop it moving better. I've not got a large amount of experience with rigging though, so I had the choice of either placing the pivot at the wrist or bottom of the staff, and so I chose the wrist as it better benefited the rest of the animation - having the ability to switch between the two different pivot placements would have been the most ideal case.

Final Struck Animation:

What's next?
All that is left to do now is to place my teams' animations together for cinematic use, with use of staging techniques among others such as lighting.

Struck Facial Animation

Here is my facial animation for the struck animation. I've attached a camera to follow the eyes of the character so that it can be seen more clearly, but this will not be the type of view seen in the actual scene.

I have tried to exaggerate the facial animation to put across the pain and struggle that he is in with this particular animation.

Struck Animation Without Facial Animation

I have completed the movement of the body for the final version of my struck animation, without the facial animation applied yet. I was having trouble with the first 0-5 frames however, where the staff would pop back and forth out of place. I know the reason why it was happening, the pivot point on the staff forces me to translate the staff when I do a rotation in order to keep it in the same place on the floor space. I applied a euler filter in order to resolve the issue but it made very little difference, probably because the error occurs within the first 3 frames, which is difficult to manipulate within such a small time frame.

I finally smoothed it out as much as possible by manipulating the rotation tangents in the graph editor. It's not perfect, but it is cleaner than it was, and with it being only 1 or 2 frames where it takes place it doesn't take much away from the animation in respects to the principles of animation. For example the weight I tried to represent in the staff is still preserved, as well as follow through actions, timing, exaggeration and arcs.

Original version:

(note: closely watch the bottom of the staff at the beginning frames)

Cleaned up version:

(note: closely watch the bottom of the staff at the beginning frames)

All that is left to do is apply animation to the face and eyes.

Animation Realism

To illustrate what I mean when I've used the terms realism and believability in the past here is an adjustment I made to the struck animation which I did to make it more real.

This first video is the movement I had the character do with his arms when recovering from the struck action. It's left arm moves away from the staff without much effort put into it, and makes a fairly linear movement from one key to the next.

To improve on the animations exaggeration and believability I deleted the last few frames I just made and redid them so that there is a little anticipation stemming from the collar bone and shoulder, which pushes down on the staff and then allows the arm to follow through and move away.

Using the Graph Editor for Key Frame Efficiency

I have started looking at the timing of my 'struck' animation now that I have almost completed the pose-to-pose for it. I noticed that when I remove frames between two keys that the staff and hand controller aren't moving quite as quick as everything else, and so the result is the staff detaching from the hand's grip as shown in the image below:

Hand and staff moving apart. The graph showing slow-dipping arc path.

Here you can also see why the controller is behaving this way in the graph editor. To correct this error you can either insert a new key frame between the two where the error is occurring where you want the staff to be, which will correct it but also increase the amount of frames you have and therefore decrease the efficiency of your animation, or you can do what I chose to do and manipulate the key frames' values by breaking and freeing their tangents, and moving them so that in this case the Translate-Z value is brought down in a quick space of time, which will make the staff move in the Z axis more quickly and therefore allow the hand and staff to stay as an unbroken link.

The hand and staff are now together again. The graph is showing a sharper decline from the first to the second frame in context.

Pivot problem resolved

I have found a solution my pivoting problems on the staff and wrist; to slightly change the animation. After a few days of trying to find a solution to the problem I finally came to the conclusion that it was probably something only a technical artist could resolve, a character rigging artist, and so decided instead of spending more time trying to fix the issue I thought I would find a way around it. To do so I slightly changed the animation, in the sense that instead of the staff rotating forward slightly before bolting backwards, I would instead have the whole staff jerk forwards before the backwards motion. It looks believable and so I am not too annoyed at not being able to fix the pivot problems, and it now allows me to carry on with my work.

Staff and hand move forward before the being struck action.

Struck action - no pivoting issues.

Rig Pivoting Problem

Whilst animating the struck animation I've come across a problem that I am struggling to solve. The pivot of the staff/hand needs to be changed mid animation, but doing so causes the start of the animation to use the latest pivot placement throughout the entirety of the animation. When the character gets struck I need the pivot to be placed on the bottom of the staff to allow it to rotate forward as to produce a clean and believable representation of an overlapping action. I can do this by moving the pivot to the bottom and it works well. I then need the pivot to be placed back at the wrist position so I can thenceforth move the staff and hand with it pivoting around the wrist. That is easily done, but now when I play back the animation the rotation and translation information uses the pivot where it was last placed (the wrist), and therefore the clean believable overlapping action of the staff no longer takes its pivoting information from the bottom of the staff, but from the wrist, making it translate out of place.

A few images to illustrate the problem:

Pivot placed at bottom of staff for clean rotation forward.

Clean rotation forward.

Pivot moved to wrist for the next set of key frames.

The start of the animation now takes its pivoting information from the latest pivot placement, the wrist.

Compare this image to the image above and you can see the staff has moved its base, and is now following the wrist pivot instead of the initial pivot at the bottom of the staff, causing it to change its position at the bottom of the staff and therefore becomes an unrealistic movement.