Here is my documentation of following the tutorial for blocking out and animating a rigged character shifting its weight from side to side. As always, I found this informative in terms of how (relatively) human anatomy prepares for its movements, its interaction with weight in terms of physics, and the idiosyncratic body language imbued even in small movements like this one. It’s especially interesting and illuminating to me how animators use movement to communicate identity, emotion, and personality in these movements in a way that the conscious mind behind an untrained eye wouldn’t notice, but the subconscious recognises as significant.
The process began with ‘blocking’ out the movements in five frame increments; I like working like this – it sets out the bare bones of how things will look in the graph editor in such a way that editing it later is straight forward.
This is the first iteration of the fully animated weight shift from start to finish. Every movement is happening at 5 frame increments, but the result is that the ball with legs shifts its weight from side to side. I’d say this looks alright, but it would be an interesting challenge to try to communicate nervous energy in the same movement, as the ball in this animation looks fairly confident.As can be seen in the graph editor at the bottom, some keyframes have been spaced out more than others to prolong certain movements in line with how gravity would interact with a body moving in this way. Other movements are shortened to communicate the necessary rushing as gravity drags the body down. I was surprised again with the amount of personality communicated by this lightning and lengthening of certain movements, it puts a spring in the step of the rig. (I apologise for the massive green frame on one side of the video – I don’t know why that’s there and when I try to crop it out it disappears).The same sequence from the side.I’d noticed that somehow I’d started my animation sequence on the wrong pose instead of a neutral one, so I moved my sequence back by a few frames and input a neutral pose at the start, then a slight shift to the left before the initial bigger shift to the right. I also put a polygon cube under the rig to act as a floor for the scene as I’d just learned we were meant to be doing that the whole time.On first editing my work into spline from blocking, it appeared I’d created a monster. The joints moved seemingly of their own volition and the rig looked possessed.
I’d hoped to continue editing the graph to improve the stepped to spline transition, but my file stopped recognising the reference (the rig) and refused to open the Maya file with the rig even after locating the reference in my hard drive, which essentially dumped all my progress. So I will have to start again.