Much of the movement started out very differently but with critique from my art directors and some general idea shifts, I believe it became something much better. Now let's take a look at where it all began.
The first step I did was block out some key storytelling poses. Normally these are the poses that you only need to covey the message the biggest actions (large anticipations, impacts, etc.) In my scene I put a few more though, because I like to put in extra poses for things like swings and falls. Because of the nature of these motions they generally need a lot of poses to come out right anyway, so I just like to do them as soon as possible, and maybe even test them out in auto.
This is probably the biggest transition from one iteration to the next. Going from stepped to auto can greatly affect an animation, and mine was no exception. It took some tweaking to in-between the right hand, because the way I have the file set up, the bat is parented to the left hand and the right hand is hand keyed to follow the bat. There are ways to set up the bat too follow one hand and the other hand to follow the bat, but those methods weren't yielding me any results, plus for such a short animation, it wasn't too much trouble to hand key that extra hand.
If you noticed I also switched up the fall at the end. I felt that the spinning fall from before just wasn't that interesting, at least not the way I was doing it. It was very evenly spaced and just looked like he was levitating in the air as he spun, which is not the look I was going for.
This iteration was highly critique based with the two biggest changes being the arms in the shrug motion, and the ball deforming and being retimed. The shrug was something I was a bit iffy on from the start. Though the silhouette was there, it wasn't necessarily the best pose. In real life using the W pose to shrug is a common thing that we do almost without thinking, but in animation, it adds to the symmetry of the character, which can do more harm than good. The speeding ball was a nice suggestion by my art director to help sell the impact of the ball. Less frames to make it faster and stretch it out to make it even faster, while also leading the eye.
The spin motion was also changed a bit. I now have him more balanced on his left leg while the right one is in the air. My reasoning behind having him more tipped over at first was to exaggerate the swing and sell the motion with a large arc. But it turns out that keeping him balanced can still give a similar effect.
A smaller but still necessary change is that I added more motion to the ball and bat, after they hit the ground, just giving them more life with bounces and rolls.
For this next iteration, I decided to render it, because if something potentially went looked wrong in the render, this would be the time to fix it, before it gets to late. Much of the render setup came from another rig created by Josh Sobel, which really gives a nice cartoony feel, while also being very fast when it comes to render time.
In terms of animation, this whole milestone was more dedicated to subtile changes. For instance, I lowered the hands a little bit more for the shrug this time around. Other than that just curve tweaking in the graph editor for better motions.
Now let's look at the final again with all this background information.
One change that came up pretty close to the end was the removal of the dusting off of the hand. With each iteration it seemed to get shorter and shorter. With a suggestion from my art director, I decided to just take it out entirely. It was probably the weakest part of the shot because it seemed to clutter up that section of animation when the real focus should be on the ball hitting the character. The section benefited much from a hold that just keeps the viewer in anticipation until the impact, making it even more intense because of the huge shift from slow to very fast.
Overall I'm very proud of my scene, and am glad that I put in all the effort I did in iterations and critique. But animation is never truly done and can always be improved. So I'll be revisiting this scene again sometime before I put out the final reel, and make any tweaks with a fresh eye. Any changes I make, I'll report back here in an update, and remember, the fastest way to see my new work is through my website www.raresgruian.com. I post it there first and then I talk about it here in more detail when I have some extra time. In fact there is some more new demo reel stuff up there now!
Thanks for sticking to the end and I hope you found this at least somewhat entertaining, if not informative. See you next time.
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