3DVA Project

3DVA project part 1

First part of this project is to create a walk cycle, it is not that difficult after you have found a good reference as it really helps in managing each key frame which is very important for this assignment. Having reference make this part easier as we will only be left with the upper body. The first problem I have face was I tried to copy and paste the walk cycle so that I can reach 240 frames but in the end, my whole walk cycle was messed up thus I learnt that I need to implement it keyframe by keyframe. After doing all these for awhile I find that doing each keyframe at a time is quite easy.

Althought swinging of the arm and rotation of the body are easy to do but need to make them to move in the same pace as the hand are quite hard. But after a few tries, I had make it to how I want it to be.

3DVA project part 2
Part 2 of the project require us to show a climbing up a few steps of stairs and jumping animation. I was really excited for the jump cycle animation as the reference I had found was all looking quite cool and interesting and I would like to make my animation to look like the reference. Although the final product of my animation do not have a really good climbing up stair animation but I do feel that my jump animation was quite cool.

Character Animation 2

I am unable to post this video together with my previous post thus I need to post it in a different post.

Sorry for all the inconvenience cause. 

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.