Cleaned Up Weightlifting Animation

This week I cleaned up my weightlifting animation. I had an issue with the hands last week, they looked very jittery due to adding too many key frames to try and fix the barbell moving in weird directions in MooM's Hand. I discovered that adding more and more key frames is not they way to go.... it actually just made things much worse. So, instead I deleted unnecessary key frames and then cleaned up the animation in the Graph Editor and parented the barbell to the right hand control. After cleaning up and tweaking the poses a little, I'm a lot happier with how the animation looks. Cleaned Up Weightlifting Animation from noah greenhalgh on Vimeo.

Maya Weightlifting - Added Barbell

In today's class we looked at staggering key frames and also adding a weight to the animation. I tweaked my animation a little by moving the pelvis forward and the hands a little closer to the body. However, when I added the barbell to the scene, I realized how wrong the positioning of the hands were. I tried my best to fix this but this made my timeline a little chaotic and the hands are now very shaky, so I may just remove the animation I have done for the hands and start again, unless there is a less time consuming way to do this? I'm not happy with how rough the animation looks right now.
Weightlifting Added Barbell from noah greenhalgh on Vimeo.

Maya Weightlifting - Restart

In today's Maya class I worked on fixing my weightlifting animation. I think the reason why I was so unhappy with my previous attempt (posted yesterday) was because I was using forward kinomatics on the MooM model's feet instead of inverse kinomatics, which meant that the feet were sliding around awkwardly and it was difficult to fix this without being very meticulous and time consuming. I also didn't like how I had positioned the spine. I figured that it would be less time consuming to just start again instead of messing up my timeline further. I was much happier with my second attempt so I cleaned up the animation in the graph editor, ready for next week when we work on loosening up the animation.

Second Version of Weightlifting Stepped Tangent from noah greenhalgh on Vimeo. Second Version Weightlifting Animation from noah greenhalgh on Vimeo.

Maya Weightlifting - Added Poses

Weightlifting Added Poses from noah greenhalgh on Vimeo.

Updated Moom weightlifting animation, pretty similar to the last video I uploaded, but with more in between poses. I'm really not happy with how this is looking though. I'll be tweaking the poses a lot as I feel like I've positioned the spine wrong and the whole thing looks very stiff.

Character Design Week 3 - Rough Project Concepts

In today's class, we also had some time to work on our own projects, so I started drawing some rough thumbnails of my Aristocrat Ghost from 1920s Paris. These concepts were loosely based on my research on both 1920s Paris and Art Nouveau.

Character Design Week 3 - World Building and Rough Sketches

I've been trying my best to catch up on my character design class this week. Today we looked at how important world building can be when it comes to telling a story. I was given a couple of simple tasks during the lecture presentation; Draw Big Ben in an exaggerated way, and draw an environment for an Egyptian Pharoh. 

Big Ben Thumbnail Sketches

Justin liked the smaller sketches of the tower as he said that putting perspective into account wasn't massively important when thinking of the overall design of the building, and to focus exaggerating the building in a way that gave it more character. He also advised that I look at the building in more detail, as there may be some cool things about the building that I wouldn't notice from a distance, so I started drawing a detailed zoom in of the clock face of the tower.

Pharoh's Tomb Rough Concept

This is a rough concept of a throne room for a powerful Egyptian Pharoh. Justin liked the idea, but he said there isn't enough personality in the drawing. He could figure out that the Pharoh that owned this room was powerful, but not much else. For example, it doesn't show if the Pharoh is scary, or serene, there's not a lot of character to it.

Poses and Arcs in Motion - Weightlifting Key Frames

In Today's class, we were asked to apply the skills we learned posing the MooM model to animation. This is a very basic animation using a stepped tangent to simulate 2D animation, I'll only be using a stepped tangent while creating the extreme poses of the weightlifting animation, the animation will look more fluid once I start adding more in-between frames.

Weightlifting Stepped Tangent Animation from noah greenhalgh on Vimeo.