This week, I mainly made some changes and improvements based on Luke’s suggestions last week. It mainly consists of two parts. The first part is the amplitude of the following motion. In the third segment, the spine movement of the character and the adjustment of the feet.
In order to make the action of this character more cartoon, I listened to Luke’s opinion, and lengthened the time between the follow movement of the arm, and the range was slightly larger than before, so the character looked more flexible and comfortable. Before, my follow motion animation only included the crotch and head. Now I added the chest and neck, and adjusted the staggered frame from one to two to make his body look softer.
However, the problem is that the hand on the waist seems to be moving all the time, because I use FK here, not IK, so I spent a little time to correct the position of the hand so that it is always in the position of the waist.
Comparison before and after modification
Then there’s the hand flick. Although I’m satisfied with the previous hand flick, I still adjust the left character’s hand. I hope his hand flick will be slower. If it’s too fast, I can’t see the track of the hand. Then I focused on adjusting the tilt of the spine of the character on the right. It was a little stiff before. Now I want to increase the feeling of curve. I deleted and adjusted the distance between the keyframes so that even if the action was fast, it didn’t feel stuck.
Comparison before and after modification. I think it’s a little smoother.
Then there is the part that I spent a lot of time. I think it’s a bit difficult. First of all, I adjusted his footwork. This time, I looked at the reference carefully, and tried to get up from the chair from time to time when I was doing animation, trying to do these actions, because I think the reference is sometimes misleading, because this kind of performance is deliberate. So I did it again out of habit in an empty environment. I found that when people walk slowly, they don’t lift their feet very high. The landing and lifting angle of the toe and heel will not be very high, because in a relatively long period of time, the foot hardly gets up, but it is a bit like walking close to the ground.
I control the roll value of his heel lift and heel down to within 5. I also make the time of feet in the air shorter, so there is no sense of floating.
What I can’t control well here is that I hope his walking displacement is straight forward, that is to say, the forward motion curve of the crotch is in a straight line. But sometimes, the knee will spring away suddenly, just because the action reaches the extreme value of a vector. So I often have to confirm that there is no such problem, and then adjust the position of the foot, not only the angle raised by the foot, the displacement length of the foot will also affect the effect of this animation, like a puppet, all are interrelated, modify one is to modify a lot of controllers.
Then there is the problem of the spine. The spine of the character on the left tends to tilt. The head is raised. The character on the right is curled up on the back. The head is also downward.
The most difficult part is the finger chest movement. I always adjust the controllers of his feet, crotch, spine, chest and waist. These controllers interact with each other, so once one is adjusted, other values will be affected. Although it is only a few seconds, I spend a lot of time to fine tune. Now the finger pointing to the chest has some strength, although it still doesn’t feel very strong.
I rely too much on the reference here, so I ignore some body ups and downs when walking, so my body still looks a little stiff. But I have tried my best to make the spine have some ups and downs and changes in front and back, left and right under the condition of proper dynamic curve.
The arms of the two characters look a little stiff, but I don’t want them to be too large to attract attention. At this time, the attention should be on the fingers of the character on the left, because the character on the left is pushing the character on the right, which should be the highlight of this animation
I think the dynamic of the spine and the body curve of the character are much better than before, and the distance between the two characters is not so narrow, which makes the movement of fingers pointing to the chest no longer constrained and has more space to play.
Here I try to do the following movement on the arm, though it’s not obvious. I also add that every time I’m pointed, the head of the right character has a downward trend to show that.
In the end, I’m not very good at grasping the collar. I don’t know how to make clothes as if they were picked up. So I just modified the spine for the time being. Now it seems that this action is not awkward. It’s like a dispute.
I always don’t know how to solve the problem is how to make the character on the right more flexible. Now he looks a little stiff. And how to make the action of grabbing collar more natural, and how to make the action of finger pointing chest more dynamic and real. I think the essence of my animation should be the distance, dynamics and strength between the two characters to set off the tense atmosphere, which depends on the animation to present. I also need to spend a lot of time to adjust the action details.
Comparison before and after modification.
Changes to this version
After Luke’s comments, he gave me some suggestions.
- The action of putting the heel down slowly is too slow. Normal people’s heel can’t spend 10 frames from lifting to falling. Try to land on the sole of your foot and put your toes down slowly instead of stepping on the whole sole of your foot.
- When there is a dispute, if one character wants to grasp the collar of another character, the action should be fast, not slow. It should be a moment to show the power and emotion.
- The action of grasping the collar should also pay attention to the following movement of the body and spine.
There are a lot of recent projects. I didn’t spend a lot of energy and time on this modification. Now the general framework of the action is available, but it is not detailed enough. I will continue to revise it later. I hope it is a complete and completed performance animation. There is still a long way to go.