Animating

I did all the animation within Maya and in a previous post I mentioned that it took me a long time and a lot of different iterations before I was happy with a run cycle I had created. Throughout the whole animation process I have constantly been going back through my reference videos we took at the start to work out how our characters were going to move. I also would act it out to myself to understand the weight and movement of the character more.

To begin with I blocked out the animation which gave me a good idea of how long the shots would be and I could work with that when refining the animation. I was then going to change the curves from stepped to linear and then to spline, however I found this really awkward, when changing between them my movements ended up being all over the place and I couldn't edit them too well. I'm not sure if I keyframed everything each time so this could have been the reason why so I may try this technique again at another stage when I have more time. Because of this however I ended up starting from scratch and using the auto tangents. I didn't really edit the curves too much once I keyframed it all, maybe a few tweaks here and there for timing but I didn't really have the time to go in and really analyse each part. I would have liked to as this would have given me more practice within the graph editor. I did keep referring back to the blocking animation though to make sure I was on track with the timings.

The video below shows a playblast of where Gloria falls into the buildings which consequently knocks them all down, because I couldn't get any reference for this I had to guess and luckily it turned out really well on the first attempt. I made sure they fell one after another, but at a quick enough pace to look convincing. I think they all fall over a couple of frames which may seem really quick but it needs to be that fast, needs to be punchy. I love animation and even though I struggled with the run cycle it just takes time and practice to get it looking right, by doing this module it just confirms that I do want to be an animator and more specifically a character animator.