If you know me well enough then you are probably not surprised with my lack of making posts on my blog, if you don't, well then I am sorry, I get distracted easily. Anyway, since my last post I finished up my going into cover animation, shot reference for my new death animation, and have been working on that.
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Alright, so the last thing you saw of my cover animation was the blocking pass. Well since then I polished the animation up quite a bit and rendered it out...
You might noticed I added some animation when she hits the wall, like a hit reaction. My blocking was lacking this and it really makes the animation feel a whole lot better. Also the fingers, I am a firm believer that finger animation just makes your animation come to life, it's crazy what a difference they make! I also rendered out a back view of the animation for the use of showing another angle on my reel...
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Now if you've seen my earlier posts in this blog you may remember the video reference I took of me falling back in a chair outside (my family particularly loved it). Well I have in store for you some more video reference of me harming myself all in the name of animation!
Now that was all of the different takes I took to choose from. My teacher pointed out that the ones where I land on my knees first, while they were pretty cool, would probably not work because of the limitations of the rig I would be working with. So we went with one where there was still an interesting movement happening but not so much knee landing...
From there, I imported the reference into Kinovea, which is really a great program for examining reference video and picking out your key poses, and it's free! From Kinovea, I created my key poses in Maya using the timing from my reference video...
You may notice that the action looks slow, that's because for some reason when you use the timing from your reference video in your animation, the animation actually ends up looking slow. So after looking at this pass my teacher pointed out, and I realized, that needed to speed up the timing and adjust the fall so it looked more like the character was slamming onto the floor. So here is my breakdown pass of my animation...(for some reason I can't get the video to upload correctly to YouTube :/ )
From this pass I received some good feedback from my teacher mentioning that I could add some hang time before she drops to the ground as well as really pay attention to the motion path of both of her hands. Also I added some weight to her head by having it bounce a little when it hits the ground...
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Well, that's where I'm at now! I've finished workshop 1 but I still have time to work on this animation before the next class starts. Also, side note here, I've actually been using my Wacom tablet to animate for this entire semester and oh my goodness, the difference is crazy! I can't believe I didn't force myself to use a tablet earlier, it's so much easier on my wrist! My mind is blown!
