Max Walk Cycle Animation - Week 7

The video above is an improved version of my animatio walk cycle. A couple of weeks ago I atempted the walk cycle for the Max rig after seeing a presentation on Udo and thought I would be able to do it. A week or so after producing my first animation walk cycle I looked at it and showed other in my class what I had done and the feed back I got from it was that it looked too robotic, he doen't have a natural movement or bouce to him.

So Sam set the class the task this week of working on the walk cycle, I felt that now would be the best time to redo the animation. I started from fresh and decided not to open up the original file and work over it. This time I took my time and always looking at my research images and the aniamtion started to look good. One major element I added was the bounce he does while walking this as soon as I added it gave the movement more realism and made it more believable.

My fist walk cycle animation took 30 minutes, this took the whole 3 hour lesson and I feel it shows. I'm really proud of this animation and when showing it to Sam, she helped me with a few tweaks with the footplacment. For example when MAx is about to place his foot down, the heel of his foot will lead and not his toes, because no one does that. also having the feet not be pointing straight forward but however having them point outwards a tiny bit, not too much but enough to give the Max more character in his stance.



Max Jump Animation - Week 6

In this lesson we had a task to animate Max jumping. Getting max to jump I would find to be a really hard task as your trying to give the impression that Max is actually forcing his body to jump and lift himself off the ground to finally land.

When starting this task for the first time I found it kinda easy to to place Max in his key poses, however when I started to play the aniamtion out it looked too fast and blocky.

                               

So what I needed to do was try and get the aniamtion to run smoothly and look belivable which at the moment it doesn't. I felt I also neede him at the start of the animation to prep himself ready for jumping, for example have him either counting down to when he is about to jump or either streching or something just before he jumps in the aniamtion. I also thought I could maybe add something to the end of the aniamtion like him stabling himself after the jump.

I wanted to first get the aniamtion to run smoother, so I used the dope sheet but I struggled adjusting. The main reason was that I didn't key all of the character on every keypoint. This would be a big reminder for me in the future to always key everything. I was also thinking that maybe I could redo the aniamtion because I felt I could possibly make it alot better than before and it would give me a bit more practice.

So I opened up a new scene and began to redo the jump animation. I started with the pre-jump part of the animation and have Max counting down his jump. When redoing the aniamtion I got a better understanding of where to place my keys for example in the first aniamation jump the key poses were around 5 - 7 keys apart, which was one of the reasons why it didn't look so smooth because I wasn't given the rig any time between the key frames to properly move to the next. However with the new one they were sometimes double that.

Another thing I didn't want his jump to be as hight as it was in the previous animation. I thought it might look better as it would look more belivable than before and might actually look like he is lifting himself of the ground. 

Here's the final aniamtion of Max jumping. I am more happier with my new aniamtion than my previous attempts. However If I could go back and change anything it would be to maybe have his count down at the start to be a bit entertaining and have something at the end like for example have him celebrate his jump.

Golf Swing and Dope Sheet - Week 5

This week we were introduced to the dope sheet tool found in Maya. When Sam our teacher first showed us the dope she said this will save ourlives when we start properly animating Max in other things. To help us get a better understanding of the dope sheet we had to animate Max preforming a golf swing. This I had a lot of fun doing as before we as group started to aniamte Max we were all stood up and pretending to swing a golf club. Having played golf quite a lot in my spare time I felt I could approach this animation with a lot of confidence.

However us having to aniamte Max preforming a golf swing and this helping us get a better understanding of the dope we were meant to at first do this animation in three key stages.

the starting poisition, then Max swinging his arms to the far right and then passing his starting point where the ball would be and continuing to swing to his left side. However I started to add other keys between these three key points because I wasn't happy with the animation. One major point I had to keep reminding myself was to key the whole character because if I didn't the dope sheet would be pretty useless to me.

Here's a snapshot of the dope sheet for my golf animation and you can see every strip is a key frame in my animation and in every strip has black boxes and these represent every part of the character Max that you can control. 

When starting to play around with the dope sheet I realised how useful it will be and how much time it can save me to help get my aniamtion looking better. I loved how easy it was to move a key frame where ever you want and this can really help you space out your keys to get the aniamtion looking smooth when it needs to be smootha nd look fast when it needs to be fast. As you can see from the screen shot above the golf animation is rather fast because Max has to gain a lot of speed bfore he hits the ball to get a decent shot.