Walk the Walk

Finals came and went for Character Animation 1 and I can easily say I've learned a lot from the projects this month. The last animation project I have to talk about is the Bugsy walk. You may remember Bugsy from the Strong Poses project, but this is Bugsy 2.0 with a more robust rig, palette swaps, and a huge desire for riding elevators.

ooohh, the colors

Before even beginning to animate, developing some good pre pro was necessary. I went through a couple of ideas of how I wanted my animation to go with some exploratory drawings. This was to explore some of the possibilities and potential of the actions I had to create. Bugsy had to start and end somewhere and he had to hit a button. It was up to me how he went about that though. Plus exploritory drawings are a good place to see if the silhoette of your character will look nice in the pose you have chosen.

After choosing the poses I preferred, or a combination of a few, I moved on to storyboards. These are made to develop a good feel for the range of action and see what kind of timing and poses you are working with in a scene. In a production it's also a good gauge of how much a scene will cost (but we'll just leave that one out for now.)

Finally we have the action breakdowns. These are made to take a better look at your motion and see what all the keys and breakdowns would look and how you would pose them. You don't want a crazy amount of breakdowns, because at that point you're just 2d animating, but you want enough to define your motion, see your principals of animation, and convey your ideas quickly to someone else.

Now it's time to get into Maya and animate. The first step is blocking out the key poses to get contacts and the basic poses of the button press and start and end. For this I made two MEL buttons to speed up the workflow, one to key most all controls and one to select the controls that are needed to move the whole body. In this stage it's really necessary to make sure the feet are not sliding so it doesn't become a problem in the future.Animating the eyes this early helps to not make your character look like a zombie and also gives you more control over how your character is displaying his emotion (I hadn't done it yet.)

After the contacts come the passing poses, followed by the ups and downs (this is all in stepped mode still.) Working on the turn is very similar to the walk, the same rules apply in terms of key poses, but the curve progression looks a bit different.

This is a good time to check your curve progression in the graph editor and maybe even switch into auto tangent to test your walk. I had a few issues where my extreme poses were in the wrong keys so it took a bit of extra time to go back and fix it. Also while in auto check for any popping in the legs
on the in-betweens and fix those appropriately (This can be a result of having an up pose too high.)

The moving holds can be implemented in the stepped phase or auto. I did a little of both. This is also a good place to key the blinks and the mouth to further push the emotion. Secondary action like antenna bobs and hand sways will also lend to the animation, but above all get the main motion down.

I want to get back to the eyes for a moment because they are really important to the character. I put in a few extra keys for the blinks to have more control of their speed. Sometimes it's also necessary to pose the eyes in what seems to be an unnatural position in perspective, but they still look good in the camera. This is so the audience can properly read the eyes and there is not too much white space, giving a zombie like effect.

not very readable

better

 After all the basic requirements were met, I added a bit more movement to the elevator to put some personality into the scene.