Rigs and Body Mechanics

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Reference Footage Notes

When creating reference footage for your animation, you should not stick to it 100%. Otherwise you might as well rotoscope it. It is better to get primary references, as long as your skill level and time allows it, second hand footage cannot be controlled by you. Therefore, you can’t alter it or advance it. You can’t control the lighting, angle, position or quality etc. There are further freer limits to what you can produce yourself, for example sword acting, parkour, animals or acrobatics. This you may not be capable of yourself with sufficient quality. Furthermore, secondary reference videos may only be suitable for a quick test or where you can’t make the reference yourself but not for a final major project.

Edit your reference video in After Effects to your chosen frame rate (make sure to set the frame rate in Maya to the same. Add a frame rate timecode in After Effects. This can be a helpful reference, however, the frame rate timecode became a mess within Maya. Even though the video was (mostly) fine, the time code jumped sporadically.

Note to self: Higher frame rate will reduce motion blur. When in Maya, you need to match your animation frame rate to the footage frame rate.

Weight Reference:

Lift, Push and Pull – reference video | Advanced Animation Skills Workshop (wordpress.com)

Bodies in motion reference:

Scott Eaton’s Bodies in Motion – dynamic figure reference for artists. Art and inspiration from the human body in motion – Bodies In Motion

The Making of the Animation – Stand-to-Sit-to-Stand

Here (in the picture below) I highlighted the key poses to help plan how I will animate the body’s centre of gravity. And I gestural lines to describe the bodies shape. Also, this helps me to look at the shape of the spine.

I have made these line of action and centre of gravity lines in order to help me decide upon how to make the poses. I planned this out with the main poses before I started animating.

After I finished with the key frames on every 8 frames, I noticed some immediate imperfections.

I added in-betweens to fix these parts where the hand goes through the leg. There is also a a few frames where, once the model sits down, the hips wiggle forward and backwards a bit. This happened even after I copied the hip coordinates from the key frames where the sitting position should be the same. I think the hip rotation may have something to do with this, but the hip rotation is needed whilst the model is sitting down. So, I will try to figure this out.

Now that I look at the graph editor it seems that even though I copied and pasted the exact units to the next frame to try and fix the hip wiggle, this would not have worked. This is because in the graph editor the tangents are not in linear and instead look like this.

Note to self that if the animation doesn’t look right, make sure to double check the graph editor.

Fixed the middle and also adjusted the curves. I have a lot more to go through.

After the adjustments within the graph editor, the animation plays much smoother. This was the result.

(The comparison is in a screenshot above).

However, I still need to fix the hand positions as the tend to move toward and backwards when they should stay on the leg, mostly still. Also, the hip wiggle is still present for some reason.

I noticed some key frames in the graph editor are still as I showed in a screenshot above, even though I adjusted every control in the progression step above. As you can see:

This wiggle should not happen.

I noticed that more tangents like this were present even though I just fixed them. These changes didn’t revers after I changed/checked them again. However, the hands still move forwards and backwards when he is in the process of sitting down. It is hard to correct/control these well since I cannot use the move axis on the hand controls, only the rotational controls.

I accidently clones the controls, and I am not sure how to undo this now. Deleting one pair did not work at first, but after trying to delete them individually, that worked… Temporarily. They came back later on. I had nearly finished with my animation so I just decided to work with the clones as well as the original as I couldn’t delete them.

Reminder to Self:

IK – ROTATIONAL INDIVIDUALITY.
FK – PARENTED MOVE TOOL.

I had a hard problem with the hand placement, as they kept moving through the legs and I have to align them in the same position when the body stood up. This was a difficult challenge for me as I used IK handles (Rotational controls), and without the ability to move the wrist horizontally and vertically, this became difficult to rely on rotational controls. In the future, I should think more carefully about whether to use IK or FK handles. If I need to control the hand position as though it is resting/putting weight on the legs as the body stands (such as in this animation) then the control with the ability to use the parented movability of the FK controls.

I have noticed that the best way to position the arms with IK controls, is to place the joints (e.g. shoulder, then elbow, then wrist) in a hierarchy order. To place them in the exact position they should be and then work your way down the hierarchy. This may sound straight forward, and it is straight forward if you do not have to move the arms later, however, the later edits to other body parts may effect the necessary position. Such as when I was fixing the body wiggle problem, the hands then went through the knees and I had to essentially restart the arm pose animations.

Play Blasts

Final Animation

I am satisfied with the overall result of the animation, however, this process needs to undergo further refinement for the body’s movement. Such as, the hands were a pain and the outcome is below my expectations. The movements look quite natural and the timing is spot on. The hands do not sit well enough on the knees, and jump about sporadically, especially when the model is standing up. I tried to keep the hands from moving away from the knees when standing, as though the model is adding weight on the knees with the hands in order to get up. Nevertheless, this attempt was not the best. I found it more difficult to edit the hands the further in progress I got in the animation. Next time, I should make the key frame poses, then focus solely on any limbs the make contact with each other, like this scenario where the hands rest on the knees and must remain in the same position as the knees straighten. I have learned from this, that I should (after keying in the main poses on 4s) look at the graph editor to focus on such limbs no moving through other limbs. Only after I have completed these more complex tasks, I should go back and tweak the rest of the body. Than is unless I will make drastic changes, then I should finish the rest of the body animations, and then, complete the complex limbs e.g. the hands.

I question the angle of the spine at some points, though, this may just be me being nit-picky as the model is not going to act perfectly normal when asked to act (the model = something to think about in the future).

I subtly changed the feet position, angling them slightly outwards or inwards when he stands or sits. Next time, I would like to experiment with this differently, as I am not sure if the outcome is natural or if it is just how I imagine it should look like.