Advanced Animation - Project 1

29.10.2024 -  11.1.2025 (Week 6 - Week 15)
Vanessa Kei Kurniadi / 0360525
Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media
Advanced Animation - Project 1

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INSTRUCTION

Project 1: Walking Animation

In this task we are required to create a walking animation with the Snow Model. We are required to make 2 versions: the vanilla walk and attitude walk.

Fig 1.1 instructions

Mr Kamal told me that it takes 13 keyframes to create 1 step, so after adding all the extremes, they all have 3 keyframes gap. Mr Kamal also advised us to make our key location as clean as possible to create a clean animation. This method is also useful when the model is not walking in place. It helps to make sure each step distance is the same. (especially in my case because I didn't know we only needed to make a walking animation that walks in place.,.

Fig 1.2 Adding extreme poses

When the extremes were all put in, the overall animation ultimately is already functional and looks great. But upon closer inspection, it seems like sometimes there is usually some minor twitching or stretching which I fixed by adding more keyframes in between.

I also need to make sure the arrows for the knees and elbows are facing in the right direction to avoid weird elbow turns.

Secondly, for the attitude walk, I decided to use this kind of arrogant walk to practice different posture and asymmetrical movements. The back arch also somehow makes him much more light in his steps

fig 1.3 My attitude walk. There are some extra keyframes to put into the timeline to maintain the limb movements.

Here are my final render looks: 

 

fig 1.4 Rendered walk results

Final submission

fig 1.5 Walking animation final result

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REFLECTION

Experience

This task is actually much simpler than I thought it would be. The extremes are life-changing, and it feels so much easier than the 2D animation for this matter. I do notice some complications with the limb movements sometimes but usually adding some more keyframes to just "brute force" them into place seems to work out fine, though the keyframes can be quite overwhelming at times.

Observation

I noticed that we aren't supposed to make our character actually walk T.T. We just need to make them walk in place, which could make the process a whole lot easier for me. So I changed my method for the attitude walk and finished quite quickly.

Findings

I found out that while 3D animations can be much easier than 2D, there are also some pros and cons to them. 2D animation is more free to express whatever we want rather than needing to tweak everything one by one per keyframe, it also gives us some weird glitches that make the bones (usually at limbs) that we need to figure out how to solve and ti can be quite fast