Figure 1: Figure throwing ball in Maya: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XII9aKbVXrg
Following on from feedback from the latest group tutorial, I have been told that I need to make my animation quicker with more tests with a silhouette version of the figure being used. I also need to work on my poses since some of them being viewed from the front do look off and improper. We will still be moving forward with the animation poses of a double bounce walk for Nikko and a strutting walk cycle for Tinny, but I will need to have someone else look over the poses constantly just for the sake of making the final footage usable. I have been advised to make my own reference for walking with the filming of me doing the walk cycle so I have a better idea of how three-dimensional characters walk and interact for the sake of realism. Finally, I have realised that animating in 3D is considerably different from animating in 2D, for obvious reasons.
I have managed to find a sufficient reference for the most basic walk cycle where the crotch and torso remain mostly level with no significant bounce. A part of me would love to be able to just do this but I still have to make it engaging enough for the client, so I have to do something complex that gives a better indication of character. It has also taught me the importance of how well a character is rigged and structured in order for it to move sufficiently, and I managed to animate the taller characters a bit more successfully. After this degree, I will be more inclined to stick more to 2D animation, whether it be in TV Paint or any other animation software. But for now, I will just need to keep playblasting tests from Maya until I can get the flow and posing right, as well as making sure they're in mp4 for playability sake.
Figure 3: Simple 3D walk-cycle: https://www.pluralsight.com/blog/tutorials/walk-cycle-animation-in-blender
For my next series of animation tests, I will attempt to start with the contact positions of the character and then work my way through the in-betweens, as previously I had worked my way from pose to pose on the first few attempts. I will also need to become more familiar with the copy position function in Maya, and then get the cycle to a stage where I can enter an expression to make the animation keep looping and reduce the need for more keyframes. The final animation will definitely need a couple of drafts before we can get to a version that's usable, and I will probably need to try out some characters with different proportions before I get to work on the final versions of Tinny and Nikko.
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