AN03 - Advanced Body Mechanics - Assignment 01 - A Tragic Tale of Schoolyard Hubris
Well… I asked to be challenged and the Universe said “I got you bro!”
The goal of this course is simple…
Dive deeper into the advanced concepts of motion and body mechanics.
Simple is not easy though and combination of a new Instructor combined with me trying to push myself with difficult assignments made this course my first real challenge during my Animation Mentor experience.
Unlike previous courses, Adv Body Mechanics gives a lot of latitude as students. As long as our animation fits within the 120 frame time limit AND it demonstrates solid physical movements, then anything goes.
I decided to push the boundaries of the assignment with really extreme movements and inspired by movies like Hotel Transylvania I tried to tell a story with physical movements only.
Project Narrative…
Stewart can't be touched! Using jumps bends and curving, fluid steps he dodges multiple near misses as red playground balls zip past him hitting the back wall until he gets distracted and pays the ultimate price.
Reference time
I knew I couldn’t physically do the kind of action I wanted to portray, so I shot video of myself doing key movements at my own pace and then time remapped them in After Effects to create the kind of pacing I needed.
Then after analyzing the key poses and sketching on top of that reference video I got this Reference…
It’s kind of painful seeing yourself get hit in the groin over and over… Your mind knows it’s not real, but your lizard brain says “ouch” ever time.
Blocking out the poses was really fun and a technical challenge with trying to create a solid system for holding the ball all the way through the crazy moves.
I felt pretty good about the blocking so I went for a spline pass. Step one is to turn the splines from stepped to auto. Its Maya doing it’s best to create in between motion for the poses you’ve built.
The result is pretty awful but a good place to start the intensive process of splining where you go through each conrtrol starting with the “Center of Gravity” and work your way through the rig one control at a time.
About a day and a half later I had this…
Above is what I turned into the instructor as my “first draft”… LOL he ripped it apart (in a good way) and I began the weeks long process of tweaks and polishing.
Moving the camera back and giving Stewart more realistic momentum through the big jump was the most important change. I struggled with understanding the proper speed and arc of that movement and it took a couple of rounds of changes before I had something that the instructor was OK with.
My big problem was that I really wanted to make “cartoony” movement BUT the whole point of the course is to create naturalistic movements. The Instructor was right to pull me back from the “cartoony abyss” and force me to “learn correct realistic movements BEFORE breaking them with cartoon movement”.
Because the moves were so extreme, it took weeks of subtle tweaks to get to the finished result you see below.
Here’s all of the big steps side by side…
I didn’t finish this project until week 10 of the 12 week course… each week making subtle changes to the scene while also working on my other two projects… I learned soooooo much that it was worth all the effort… ONWARD to shot 02!!
