Pose to Pose and Jump Cycles

 Good Morning!

It's been a while since I've written anything on here, so i thought I should catch up on what I've missed.

Over my reading week (other than submitting my essay) I've been playing with rigs we've been given access to via our university. Among these different mega packs and standalone models I found a 'Cute Frog' rig in a folder called 'External World Characters' (by David O'Reilly: https://davidoreilly.itch.io/external-world-characters).

So, I tried animating with it.

This was very difficult. I can't blame Maya for this this time, especially as the rig was clearly designed to be a background character (or is just very old). The feet on the mesh would horribly deform if pushed past a certain point, the FKIK switches were also the pole vectors that directed the knees (which were placed against the mesh), the head was permanently in IK meaning it wouldn't turn with the rest of the body - there were a lot of issues.

I did get a playblast done though:

Now I've done a bit more research into these rigs, a lot of the issues might only exist with this rig because the pack it came from is about a decade old. So, maybe I just need to try out some more up-to-date rigs the uni has available to us.

At least I know I can work with an unruly rig like this little guy.

Now, more on the topic of the next module we're doing in class: we're beginning our Character Animation module! I've been looking forward to this one, and I'm actually pretty excited to learn some proper techniques for lip-sync.

We are also expected to create our submissions around the 11 Second Club or The Spider King competitions - which means we are going learn and use these skills to create a short character acting piece.

So, we began by creating a jump - not a jump cycle. This meant learning how to use pose-to-pose to create an action. I had never used this technique before - mostly because I've never used stepped curves before in my work.

Why haven't I used them before? Because you can very easily over rotate a controller and cause the character's hand to do a full 360 instead of just rotating like a normal person's wrist (unless that's what you wanted to do). So, I've been working without stepped curves to avoid this issue coming up - but now I've been used to working in this way, I think I can confidently use stepped curves to create blockouts.

For this exercise we use a ball to simulate the gravity on the hips of the character. Then, we'd use our stepped curves to create the poses of the character and then take them off of the steps to correct the motion and any errors in the body.

This workflow was actually very useful! It meant that I could clearly see the landing of each foot and also the exact pose the character would be in at each key frame.

Obviously, this is a work in progress playblast of what I've made so far, but I'd like to share it:

(Rig or Material used with permission (© Animation Mentor 2014). No endorsement or sponsorship by Animation Mentor. Downloaded at www.animationmentor.com/free-maya-rig/)