Body Mechanics by YUNZHAO FU

Animation principles

d3094446 — 2023-10-04 23:33:04 UTC

1. Squash and Stretch
Emphasizes speed, momentum, weight and mass. The more squash and stretch, the softer the object. The less squash and stretch, the stiffer the object. Then keep the volume of the object consistent and do not overdo squash and stretch in entire time.

2. Anticipation
Add preparation of characters can make the action appear more realistic and tell the audience the next action. We can have multiple levels of anticipation.

3. Staging
Let one action finish before the other person starts their action instead of overlapping them.

4. Straight Ahead & Pose to Pose
Straight ahead makes the animation movement look more fluent and realistic and post to post can control the character and freedom to add dramatic effect for the animation.

5. Follow through & Overlapping Action
Follow through refers to the way parts of the body continue to move after the body is stooped.
Overlapping action describes the offset between the timing of the main body and its other parts

6. Slow in & Slow out
This is one of the most important principles for achieving lifelike motion.

7. Arcs
Most living creatures will move in a circular path.

8. Secondary Action
Gestures that support the main action add more dimension to the character's animation

9. Timing
The personality and nature of an animation are greatly affected by the number of frames inserted between each main action.

10. Exaggeration
Every action, pose, and expression can be taken to the next level to increase the amount of impact on the viewer. Exaggeration doesn't mean more distorted, but more convincing.

11. Solid Drawing
This principle is about making sure that forms feel like they are in 3D space, with volume, weight, and balance.

12. Appeal
Appeal means good-looking and interesting. Use a variety of clear shapes, play with proportions, and keep simple.

Task 2 - Label the Forces

d3094446 — 2023-10-09 20:50:22 UTC

d3094446 — 2023-10-15 11:40:08 UTC

d3094446 — 2023-10-15 17:26:39 UTC

d3094446 — 2023-11-29 13:40:43 UTC

For this task, I want to make a character push a weight wooden box, and need I to change the character's hand IK and FK controller. When the role use FK control hand touch box and then, the next keyframe needs to use IK control that can avoid changing the hand's location when I move the body controller.

My reference comes from YouTube but I think that the structure from idle to push, is a little bit boring, so I added some preparation actions like swinging the hand to make the animation look more interesting.

Ball and tail

d3094446 — 2023-11-29 14:44:57 UTC

For this task, I want to make the ball and tail more interesting rather than a generic bounce. Therefore, at first, I hid the tail until the ball began to fall to the ground and then showed the tail like a helicopter to make the ball fly to the sky through stage.

Parkour

d3094446 — 2023-11-30 05:04:51 UTC

During this parkour exercise, I found that it was difficult to manually make the front and back poses the same when switching the IK/FK of the character's hand controllers, and since the Rig I was using didn't have automatic IK/FK switching, I had to use the Ghost function in MAYA to adjust the IF/FK manually.

Cycle Walk

d3094446 — 2023-11-30 15:19:35 UTC

Consider Contrllor Setting when the animation begainning.

d3094446 — 2023-11-30 23:53:25 UTC

In this task, I ignored an important setting in the process of making animation. When I finished over half the task I realized I forgot to use Root_Control to control the character's spin body in the air, that's cause I redid the animation and wasted many times.

When I get a plan and know what kind of animation I want to do, I need to consider how to use the controllers. Set role's global control where they can be used as little as possible, only change Z axis to move character move foraward that batter than change Z and X axis.

The best to set head controller follow the world location(Local World). That can make the head always keep at a same location when the character spin the body anytime. The same with arms, only the character need doing big action do we need to set controller follow our character's location.

From: Sébastien Wojda’s

https://www.cgchannel.com/2015/09/10-killer-tips-for-better-character-animation/

Feedback

d3094446 — 2023-12-13 17:01:38 UTC

Claire gave me feedback that left-hand and right-hand swings are not balanced

Dancing final Blocking

d3094446 — 2023-12-17 19:56:04 UTC

After some modifications and feedback this is my final version of BK, the character's centre of gravity and arc are much more accurate compared to the initial version of BK, and I can finally start to enter the Polish stage!

Blocking feedback

d3094446 — 2023-12-17 19:57:23 UTC

1.Foot location and rotation need to change

2.Notice the spine and shoulder arch

Lift

d3094446 — 2024-01-09 15:22:10 UTC

Through BB Learning Materials' tutorial, I learnt how to properly use constraints to animate props, before that I simply knew how to use some parent constrain, and never used a locator to assist the character in picking up props.

1. First create a Locator and "P" it to the object, then have it Match the position of the character's hand controllers (Modify-Match transformations), add parent Constrain to the Locator and the hand controllers, and then add the parent Constrain to the hand controllers, and the parent Constrain to the hand controllers. Add a parent constrain to the Locator and the hand controller, to make the hand follow the Locator's movement.

Reference

d3094446 — 2024-01-09 15:23:05 UTC

After analysing this reference video, I found that in order to reflect the weight of the object, the character has a long period of preparatory movements before moving the object, which includes adjusting the hand posture, the angle of the knees and the position of the body's centre of gravity.

When the character lifts the object, the character's body rises faster than the object, and the distance between the object and the character is shortened during the lifting process.

The arc of the character's body changes from a right-facing C to a left-facing C during the lifting process.

Dance Polish

d3094446 — 2024-01-09 15:28:08 UTC

BK_V001

d3094446 — 2024-01-09 15:50:06 UTC

BK_V001 Reflecting

d3094446 — 2024-01-09 15:58:13 UTC

This is the first version of BK for my dance task and after making it I realised that there are many problems.

1. the rotation of the character's hand in the dance was not added and the hand position did not change.

2. The arc of the character's POSE during the movement is not clear enough, the pose needs to be more dramatic

Spline_V001

d3094446 — 2024-01-09 16:08:46 UTC

Spline Reflecting

d3094446 — 2024-01-09 16:28:40 UTC

In Spline mode, I noticed an obvious problem with the pacing of the character animation, where the character's arms were opening up too fast with the lower arms, so I added lower arm following so that the arms were opening up while the hands were moving in the opposite direction.

Rigging Question

d3094446 — 2024-01-09 17:57:49 UTC

When I was animating with Aang the Rig, I noticed that the controller for his feet wasn't quite the same as the other bindings, when I moved the position of the X-axis of the foot controller, the values of the X-axis and the Z-axis in the Channel Box on the left hand side of MAYA would change at the same time, which made it difficult to tweak the graph in the animation graph editor as much as the This makes it difficult when I adjust the graph in the animation graph editor to change the value of only one graph like in the previous Rig.

After checking the internet, I came to the conclusion that the creator of the Rig had set up the bones of the character's feet to control two axes at the same time, which is a common phenomenon in bindings.

But I don't like this kind of binding, I will try to avoid this kind of Rigging in my future productions.:(

Universal IK FK Switch

d3094446 — 2024-01-09 19:52:08 UTC

This IK/FK Switch tool is very useful! It solves the problem of IK/FK switching manually causing two frames to have different POSE, and the tool is very easy to use.

In Universal, reassign the controllers for the different body parts of the character, select the controllers to load, and then you can switch between IK/FK freely!

Weight Gain and Loss

d3094446 — 2024-01-09 20:09:22 UTC

*Moving upward and gaining speed — Gains weight

*Moving upward and losing speed — Loses weight

*Moving downward and gaining speed — Loses weight

*Moving downward and losing speed — Gains weight

In a movement state, if the character makes an accelerated upward movement or a decelerated downward movement, his weight will increase.

Conversely, if the character rises and decelerates or falls and accelerates in the direction of gravity, the character's weight will decrease.

By Alejandro Garcia August 31, 2016

https://www.animatorisland.com/physics-in-animation-weight-gain-and-loss/

reference

d3094446 — 2024-01-09 20:12:38 UTC

This week's assignment was Jump and Land, my choice was to create a parkour animation, and in the process of looking for a reference video again I realised that it was very difficult to get a parkour to fit my requirements, so I went through the process of editing four different reference video clips to make a reference that suited me.