Performance Animation

WEEK 1 Preparation

Part1 How to make a great reference

Before shooting reference, I found a guide video to find some shooting skills.

If we take our own photos for reference, the efficiency will be very high.
If we look for reference on the Internet, we may be biased by the movie and TV plot in the process. I don’t know what the real purpose is.
The reference taken by ourselves helps us understand the characteristics of motion better.
Try to make the animation reference consistent with the actual situation, that is to increase the ‘weight’ into the performance. If we need to perform with props, we must take a thing with weight. If we are interacting with others, we must ensure that there is such a person to assist in the performance, so that our eyes and limbs will have a goal and explicit direction to the performance.
Don’t rotoscope the reference content completely or replicate reality, because it will lose the innovation and make us rely on the reference too much. Therefore, we must take “self-style” for subjective processing and modification, in order to have our own animation style.

Part2 Shoot reference

It really took me a lot of time when selecting the animation action, and finally I decided to focus on performance, that is, silent performance without dialogue. I think the clip is a person sneaking out of the room looking for food, tiptoe walking , almost knocked down the wine bottle on the table.

Tiptoe Walk

Facial Expression

Some techniques for facial expression.

Also some reference to the details of a surprise expression.

Surprise expression reference

I also found a very good plug-in ‘malcolm’ of maya on this website, and the models offered have very detailed and comprehensive rigs.

Shooting

There is no particularly complex and large-scale movement in this paragraph, so I would like to emphasize the performance part, that is, careful movement and expression.

I guided my friend to perform two pieces of reference.

Week 2 Blocking

Storyboard

Action analysis

The first step is to open the door. Feeling hungry, the girl touches her stomach. Then she looks around to make sure there is no one. She slowly closes the door.

The second step is that she walks slowly to the door next door. She leans on the door and listens for any movement. Then she steps back, turning around and going out.

The third step is to look around in a relatively dark environment. She stands on tiptoe, hoping to be as quiet as possible.

The fourth step, she does not notice the wine glass on the table, almost hit the glass bottle on the table in the process of walking, panic to help.

Animation Principles

timing
arcs
slow-in & slow-down
pose-to-pose
anticipation
follow-through and overlapping action

One of the more important is time, because this action has several pauses, which can better increase the chance of breathing for the furtive performance.

Character and Scene

Because the character belongs to the cartoon type, so I chose some lovely object scenes. At the same time, I chose a simple block object that won’t be too prominent, there won’t be too many colors, and the mapping is not complex, which can meet my needs for performance.

Four lights

The spotlight on the left
Yellow warm light — main light

Spotlight on the right
Purple warm light — shadow color

The table can’t shine, so it’s dark. Add supplementary light.

The character’s orange supplementary light

Two rooms

Although I finally chose not to light up the room

Rendering

Arrangement

This performance is in a relatively closed scene, so for the performance, I want to follow the reference step by step, so I first set the position of the objects that need to interact in the scene, and then determine the proportion and height of each object. So I hide the scene so that I can watch the reference video easily. I only show them when I touch them.

Process

I have a big problem in this part, that is, the girl’s head is very big, so in the interaction process of the door, I should try to keep no overlapping of models. So I changed the action in the original reference, and changed the half body exposure to the whole body. Even so, the animation of the head is very difficult. I also adjusted the size of the door, the position of the handle, and the size of the step when stepping out.

Secondly, her legs are relatively short. For taking a big step, she should master the waist controller, otherwise her feet will be empty or twisted together.

The second is the position of the door handle. I try to keep her body tilted to reach the position of the door handle. Then the hand part is also very difficult to master, because her hand is also very short, but the head is very big, which adds a lot of difficulty to the animation. So I tilted her body a little bit to avoid touching other parts of her body.

In fact, her legs are slightly bouncing in the process of creeping. That is to say, when one toe is not completely down, the heel of the other foot is lifted up, and at the same time, the crotch is pulled up, like walking, so that her center of gravity has ups and downs.

I also added a belly touching action and a left and right eye probing action to make up for the gap caused by the change of the first second action.

The next step is to go to the door and eavesdrop. The hand animation here is relatively difficult because it is very close to the wall. It takes a lot of time to prevent the overlapping of models and keep the movement fluent. It’s really difficult to do the hand movement here, because she is very close to the wall, which will cause the model to pass through the wall, so I made a lot of detailed adjustments in the hand.

However, I feel that there are still some problems here. I’ve been correcting her crotch movements, so that when she takes more steps, she doesn’t feel like lifting her feet. This step is a little difficult, because her legs are really short, and the distance is very long. I delay this piece of adjustment and hope to finish the whole blocking part first.

I went on with the rest according to the reference. I found that I didn’t master my tiptoe animation very well, and then I found some other people’s reference to figure out where I didn’t do well. Now I feel like she has been dragging her feet. I try to make sure that the whole movement is done first to see if the rhythm is comfortable. I want to change the details later. I hope I can refine my work about the tiptoe walk next week and add some blinks and micro expressions.

performance draft0

Week 3 Polish and Spline 1

After last week’s animation, I want to improve a few points this week.

Make it a little more creepy, and the landing more light and slow.
Make the feeling of standing on tiptoe more obvious.
Increase the range of action, but also to ensure that the action more coherent.
Add blink and head swings.

I found an animation made by someone else to find my problem. I found that this movement needs to emphasize the tip of the foot movement, that is, not every step is very average, there should be a clear sense of pause. So I try to make her heel do not completely step on the ground, but slightly raised, so that the feeling is walking gently.

Then I added the details of the head shaking from side to side and the eyes looking around. It also makes her body more curved and adds a sense of atmosphere.

It likes the stylized walking I did before, but they are in two different position shape. In this position, the body leans forward, and the range of looking around is relatively large. The details of the toes and the body center of gravity are the key parts.

After finishing this part, I encountered a problem, that is, I keyed blink on the animation, but the preview did not show, I have not figured out the reason, the rendering of this action is same problem.

I hope when she walks, her hands also have some posture, not rigid in the air, so she has animated her fingers.I think this model is very good, because there are many kinds of hand movements and shapes to choose from.

performance draft1

Week 4 Polish and Spline 2

In this part, I adjusted some expressions to exaggerate her surprise and panic when she knocked down the glass bottle. So far, I feel that my animation is almost finished. I just need to clarify some details and enlarge some parts like the bottle. I’ve corrected some inconsistencies in the feet, and also corrected some overlapping models. Although I’m not particularly satisfied, because if I have time, I may revise it again, but I’m still happy that I’ve made some progress.

I also adjusted the position of my eyes. I thought it was too high at the beginning. The process of walking on tiptoe is very long, and there are two turns on the left and right, so I hope he has some changes in his expression.

I also added the motion blur

Finally, I chose to remove part of the head turning animation, because after I played the animation repeatedly, I felt that the action was too full, and it was repeated from left to right or from right to left all the time, so I felt that if I removed some of them, I didn’t feel that fast, and the rhythm would slow down. And through the PR clip, make the rhythm more obvious.