Animation Mentor AN01 - Week 04
Overlapping action was the principle we studied this week. Imagine the perfect tennis stroke. You lead with your forward facing hip and leg, then your upper body rotates then your shoulders, then your upper arm then forearm then wrist then the racquet head…
Because we’re just starting the animation journey the course uses the “Tailor” rig which is a ball with a fat squirrel tail attached to it. The Tail has 4 control points that give you the ability to animate the tail moving and the assignment is to communicate “Overlapping Action” with the tail pointed straight up.
To get my head around the motion, I looked at A LOT of squirrel butts on YouTube… I mean A LOT. Squirrel tails are kinda hypnotic and quite beautiful when they’re not taunting you from a tree branch. Using a particularly good example I traced over the tail to highlight the line of action of the tail as it moves.
As always the task starts with a sketch… in my case a “crappy” sketch since I’m not good at sketching LOL…
The goal of the sketch is to understand how the tail moves with the tip lagging behind the rest of the tail as it wags back and forth. Armed with a crappy sketch, I moved into Maya to animate a basic tail wag. I did two versions… Slow and Fast…
Slow wag
Fast wag
Then because I’m trying to really understand this motion concept, I decided to animate a tail with “personality”. Instead of a basic wag, I wanted more of a “flick” of the tail that would loop seamlessly.
I started by blocking out the motion with stepped keyframes…
Stepped keyframes with even timing
Then I moved those keys to get the timing right. I wanted more anticipation in the movement.
Better timing to create some anticipation at the top of the “stroke”
With that feeling good, I massaged the curves and keys to get this finished result…
The end product!
It would be really nice if the Tailor rig had more control points on the tail. That would give a much more smooth deformation and movement of the tail as it moves through extreme poses. But, it still feels pretty good.
What did I learn? Looping animation is HARD… making sure the keys and curves line up perfectly at the start and end is a pain in the ass LOL… And after looking at something play back 100 times, you start to see things that aren’t there.
Whether it’s a squirrel tail or a tennis stroke, overlapping action is an important part of the movement of a chain of objects!
