Body Animation

The animations on this page were all focused on body mechanics. My intention was to learn something different from what I learned in school. While in school, the assigned animation projects were simple and intended to teach us the basic principles of animation. Nothing that I did while in school really pushed really hard or too far out of my comfort zone. So I decided to do that myself and animate in a style that was new to me and would really challenge me.

The following four animations are of different acrobatic and fighting movements. The first one here is of a person doing an acrobatic fighting routine. This animation was very challenging. It has many elements that each pose a challenge, such as multiple points of contact, pivoting off the feet multiple times, and overlapping. The best way I was able to make progress on this animation was to go frame by frame and key every movement. I essentially rotoscoped the animation. The first major challenge I faced was the multiple contact points and the pivoting off the feet. The character leaves the ground multiple times and spins around. This made it much more important to make sure I maintained the weight of the body in the right places while also maintaining the look of an agile individual. The overlapping movement was another challenge, especially with the really long belt hanging from the character's waist. I simply animated the belt following the body with a delay to give it weight.

The second animation had many of the same elements as the first, but had more of the challenging parts. More rotation while also moving across the screen and a lot of points of contact. My strategy on this one was similar to the first animation in this series. In order to get the flips and clean points of contact, I had to have keys on every frame around the flips and the points of contact with the floor, especially with the hands coming in contact with the floor. The most challenging part was the last part of the animation when the character flips and lands in the splits position. I had to pay more attention to the feet in this portion so that it looks like the feet slide into position but have enough drag to show the friction of the ground against the feet.

The third animation was a little less complicated relative to the previous two as it didn’t have any flips, but it did have the added element of a prop. The solution to the rapid sword tricks was the same as before, more keys. The challenge in this animation came from the various holds. This trick to the holds was finding a good balance. Initially, the holds made it look robotic. I added a little bit of overlapping movements in the arms and the head to break up the overwhelming stillness, but it looked too snappy. After adding and removing movement repeatedly, I was left with enough that the holds looked natural.

The final animation in this series I think was a good middle as far as difficulty. It has twists, multiple constraints, but doesn’t have any jumps to further complicate it. The twists were done the same as before. The challenging thing with this animation was having the two hands on the sword, one hand on the whole time and the other coming on for a bit then coming off. The way I figured this out was by placing the sword in a group. The right hand became the parent of the sword group, the sword itself was set as the parent of the left hand. This setup made it so that the right hand could control the sword and the sword essentially controlled the left hand while it was parented to it. During my first pass of animation, I also set keys on the strength of the constraint on the left hand so it could be independent or be controlled by the sword. This setup allowed for the right hand to drive the sword and as a result the left hand, but still maintain the ability to animate the left hand.

The following animation is of a character jumping from a small ledge and landing on a taller then climbing over it. For this animation, I wanted to use a method that I used on a monologue animation where I map out key parts of a video that push the animation. I watched the reference video a few times, drawing different silhouettes and taking note of things that happen as the character goes through the motions. I usually just animate what I see in reference video and sometimes I notice certain things, other times I don’t. A lot of notes I took were when the character lands on the wall. This allowed me to include minor details like the way the feet land, slide down the wall, and push off the wall. I was able to convey the weight and force of the character better while also saving a lot of time.

The final animation on this page is of two characters fighting. The goal of this animation was to show the skills I learned with the previous animations, but also to show my ability to have multiple characters interact with each other. This animation had a combination of all the challenges of the previous animations. The hardest part of this animation was the part where the pink character grabs the right character’s arm and twists it. This part had a constraint, twist, and two characters moving with each other at the same time. The sizes of the characters’ arms were another hurdle as they were too short to follow the reference. I improvised this portion a bit, took advantage of the speed of the movement and position of the camera to hide some imperfections. The mapping out method I used in the previous animation helped me a lot to get this animation made as I took note of different shapes and the small details of the characters.