Touching up the Acting scene.

I have been touching up the acting scene today - this includes making sure that nothing goes through the floor, no parts of the body go through one another, everything needs to look as clean cut and professional as possible as i have spend quite a few days getting this right. I have now restarted the whole process a few times i really want to get this 100% right (with in reason)...

I have looked back through and found that the hands on my character go through the floor and they didnt before. This maybe because i retouched aspects of the action and then it affected the rest of the rig - the arms. I'm not too sure if i am honest. It has made it very difficult to make the hand stay in the same position - i am having to key frame each individual frame and i am finishing it difficult to create continuity. However, i have done my best and it is passable, how ever if you look closely you can see that the hands slightly move when the character is hunched up on the floor.

Also the characters right leg seems to move when he is kneeling on the floor, i have tried to amend this but when i do it seems to muck up the other key frames and it looked better if i keep it like it is.

I am actually really pleased with the out come of the exercise. I am going to render it out but i think that i will come back to it in a week with fresh eyes and see if there is anything else i could do to it to improve the final outcome. Infact now i think im going to do a character walk.

Action - Side 1920x1080

Action - Perspective 1920x1080

Making the Acting Piece

To start of with, i opened the file with the rig, i saved a new project and named it version 1 - this means that when i capture it will be easier for me to distinguish what capture is what. I have watched the reference video so many times now that i  could quite confidently act out the actions in real time. I am quite excited to get started.

Later on...

I have no keyed out all of the main key frames in the acting piece which is shown in the previous comment with the reference video and the key frames and also in between's. I'm pleasantly surprised with how its going at the moment, the key frames are rather accurate and the movements seems to be in time with the keys on the reference. Now i need to start keying in the in-between frames. These are the key frames which lie in between the original key frames, so i guess you could call them sub-key frames, but i call them in-between's just to keep it easy. There should be a huge difference in appearance and movement after i put the in between frames in, it should be smoother and it should also create a illusion of weight. - This will get really interesting when the actor is on the floor thumping it with his right hand - the disproportion of weight will be really important to make it look right.

Later on...

The in between frames have made an incredible change to the movement, there is a much stronger feeling of weight and power in the body. Even with just the key frames and the in between frames it has quite a strong resemblance to the reference footage. There are some major glitches - where the character falls to its knees - the feet go underneath the floor making the character sink and then rise when i corrected it on a key frame. I will have to correct these, and i imagine i will have to key frame each frame until they have all been done to the origional key frame.

Later on...

I have found that i havent been able to get the right arch in the back of the character when he is on the floor - this is due to the rather basic rig, i understand that is has been kept basic so not to confuse us, however, it means that the moment and arching of particular parts of the body are in fact not as close to the reference footage as i would have liked. I would have liked the torso to have been able to bend more at the hips so the torso was closer to the characters thighs and also the floor. This in hand would have made it easier for me to animate the head looking up - at certain points the head slightly protrudes into the characters shoulders.

Acting Reference Material

Due to using the tennis ball reference material so efficiently i decided to do the same for this project. For this project we have to recreate a choses acting scene that we filmed in class. I decided to do one which would challenge me. One of a man falling onto his knee's, thumping the floor with disbelief. I found this one of the most interesting and dynamic - the body goes from being upright and spread up low and crunched up into a ball on the floor. I also wanted to play around the the angling of the body shapes, e.g. how the elbows move the forearms compared to the top o the arms.

This is a link to the reference video i made - i used Adobe Premium to amend and add key frames and in between frames. I found the in between frames to be crucial after doing the man key frames. With out them it looked rather bionic.

Acting Reference Material

I did find the whole idea of recreating a acting piece to be rather daunting, but this process really helped me to get everything together and organised. It helped me decided what to start with first, and what did not need to be done until later. I think with out the reference material i would have really struggled to recreate this acting piece with out any timing help. I would have got the pace and timing of the key frames wrong, and it probably would have been smooth.

I also really like the angle that the action shot was filmed at - it really demonstrated the angles of the body and the way the body falls to the floor. Really interesting - i will upload the other camera angle of the action shot tomorrow morning.

Downloading Acting Reference material

After looking at all of the material that was recorded in the studio i have decided which clip i would like to use a reference for my acting piece. I have decided to use a film of a fellow student acting out a over exaggerated crying scene.

Unfortunately at the moment it doesnt seem that i can upload my reference footage but i will see when i get home if this changes. I have been following the videos have hve been kindly filmed by one of my lecturers on  (Online Tutorials for reference material) however i am not sure if you will be able to get onto the page unless you are part of my university.

Walk Cycle.

I watched a great DVD in class about making a walk cycle, breaking it down into steps to make a generic walk cycle and then moving onto something more characterised. The DVD is a visual/audio version of Richard Williams book - The Animators Survival Kit. I have the book and i love it, but it was really rewarding to watch Williams explain his work and the way to think about walk cycles, it gives a different depth of information that the book gives. I am going to concentrate on two blocks at a time. The legs first - then the arms. There are important positions to include in your walk cycle. This is included in a previous post that which has images of all the arm positions and the main leg positions - contact, down, pass pose, up and contact.

When setting out making the walk cycle i was fully aware that the image that was supplied to us, and also the images on the internet are very exagerated in positions. This is to make it clear to us

Arm Positions

After completing the bottom half of my walk cycle i have decided to give the arms a go. Unfortunately i have had some technical issues with my character and when i select a object to move, it wont. It highlights the whole rig and i am not too sure why it keeps doing it. However, i took some print screens to demonstrate what i am talking about.

I tried looking at my character in different portals but this did not worked. I saved as and then re opened a older version and it still wouldn't work. Therefore i am going to leave it as a bug problem. Jon (my lecturer) says that Soft Image has a few problems with bugs which create technical issues. I however, did save my file to my memory stick and i opened it on another computer. Although this shouldn't be a problem as i remember Jon saying if you copy and paste a duplicate copy of the project folder onto the D Drive of any computer it means that the project is much stronger when it comes to loosing work and connection.

However instead of trying to fix something when i have no knowledge on how to fix it i have decided to do some research for tomorrows lesson where i am sure we will be animating the arm swings. Images i have found on the internet include:

Walk cycle Reseach

Most sane people have a fear of animating walk cycles. Many events are happening at the same time, and it can seem overwhelming. A single mistake on your first drawing can wreck the rest of the scene. However, the process can be broken down into a series of steps which can go some distance in simplifying the process.

A walk cycle can be described by four distinct poses:

CONTACT, RECOIL, PASSING and HIGH-POINT.

These four poses and a couple of inbetween drawings constitute a walk cycle. The single most important frame of the four is the contact pose. Once you draw it you have already determined 80% of the rest of your walk. If you make a mistake on your contact pose, it can be very difficult to correct later on. Therefore: pay close attention now and save yourself a world of pain.
www.idleworm.com/how/anm/02w/walk1.shtml

I watch a really amazing DVD which is a digital version of the Animators Survival Kit by Richard Williams. It really is a great watch, he makes it so easy, all you have to do is break it down into the main positions, once you have these, you work on the timing. You can then create walks with anger, or sadness, walks with a purpose, walks of different genders, beliefs, the list is ENDLESS. We are all programmes to look and read body language, no matter what background or what language you speak, this is one language that we can all read. You can tell by facial expressions, the frowns, eyes, smiles, all these act as clues to tell us how someone is feeling. It is the same for a walk cycle, the height of the pass pose, the length of the stride, the bend at the contact; all these factors give us visual language and can  really make a walk interesting.

There are so many things to bare in mind - the angles of the hips, shoulders, arms. The follow through of the arms, are the rigid? are they floppy? 

Here are links to my first character walk cycles i made in the first part of this course. Its important for me to look back on them and see what i could do better, what looks wrong, as im sure now, i could see some things that dont look right.

Initial character walk cycle

Final character walk cycle