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 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 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).

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.

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

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.