Character Animation

Exercise 1

Your responses to these exercises should be posted on your weblog.

i)        If engineered or programmed badly, BigDog would fall over. Watch the full video again, and describe how BigDog’s legs move while walking– ie. what is the sequence of leg movements for one complete step? Use the terms BL, BR, FL, and FR for the back-left, back-right, front-left and front-right legs.

FL BR FR BL FL BR FR BL FL BR FR BL

ii)       Explain how this sequence of movements manages to balance BigDog’s body weight.

Most of it movement is from left to right and left to right again, this cycle of movements will slowly reduce the force it received and finally achieve balance. It was most of it front legs that do the works as it legs balance it bodyweight by shifting it from mostly front right to left and slowly achieve balance.

iii)     Look at BigDog_kick_slow_motion.mov. Draw a storyboard of BigDog stabilising itself after being kicked.

You should draw the key poses. You don’t need to draw well – but you must show the leg positions and the body rotations around the X, Y and Z axes for each key pose.

Exercise 2

i)        Open bigdog_kick_01.ma (on OLIVE) This has a very basic BigDog model, with a simple rig. Note that the legs are different from the actual robot in the video, with only two sections instead of three – this is just to keep the rig simple and not overcomplicate things. Also, there is no control curve for the body – feel free to add one if you like, otherwise just animate the body directly.

Try to animate BigDog maintaining balance after being kicked.

You might find this tough, but don’t give up – after a while, and a few retries, you should manage a basic blocked-in animation.

Note that good use of the curve editor is essential for creating the illusion of weight.

ii)                   Post a playblast of your animation on your weblog. It doesn’t have to be perfect or even finished! You will not be marked for how good it is. This is just an exercise for you to think more about weight, and to show you the importance of understanding the dynamics of what you are animating. 

This exercise is really tough as it require a lot of retries, there are a lot of difficult problem I had face like making the big dog animate like it is falling. After a few retries I had figure out that it require another keyframe to animate one of it leg shifting the force to another leg as shown it exercise 1 part i. Without it my animation was just showing the big dog moving to another position, another problem I had faced was we need a pause in between each shifting of weight to different leg if not our animation would look like it was moving quickly thru the key poses.