Donatella's 3D Computer Animation Blog
My 3D Computer Animation Progress

Category: 1.7 Week 7

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1.7 Week 7 3D Animation Fundamentals

Week 7: Walk Cycle Animation

Introduction

After getting feedback on the planning of our walk cycle animation, we started animating the rig.

Walk Cycle Animation

Outcome 1 (Blocking)

My first animation did not go as planned because I accidentally animated the master controller of the rig.

For this reason, it looks as it the character is sliding instead of walking.

Outcome 2 (Blocking)

Even though my second attempt looks better than my first one, the feet of my character are still sliding.

I definitely need to keep working on keeping the feet on the ground.

Outcome 3 (Blocking)

For my third animation, I got rid of the stretch and squash deformation in order to focus on the position of the feet.

I can say that I already have the key poses of my character and it is time to change the animation into spline.

Outcome 4 (Spline)

In order to change the animation from blocking into spline, I had to edit the values on the graph editor.

What caught my attention was that the feet were sinking into the ground during the contact positions.

For this reason, I am going to need to fix the foot and toe rotation of my character.

Outcome 5 (Spline)

The walk cycle is finally looking much better.

Nonetheless, I was pointed out that I need to adjust the number of frames during the foot rotation.

Final Walk Cycle Animation

Categories
1.7 Week 7 3D Animation Fundamentals

Week 7: Blend Shapes

Introduction

This week we learned how to add blend shapes in order to create facial expressions on our rig. These expressions are going to be extremely useful when making our lip-sync animation. We also learned about the concept of phonemes that will help us animate when the character is talking and pronouncing words.

Blink

Independent Blinking

To start with, we animated independent blinking eyes.

Frown

Frown

We also added a frown expression onto the character.

Squint

Squint

Then, we also modified the eyes, so that our character can squint.

Conclusion

The most important lesson I learned this week, was that we have to pay attention on how our face moves as a whole. In order to make a realistic lip-sync animation, we need to understand the relation between the different parts of our face. In this sense, not only are we to animate the mouth independently, but also in conjunction with the other parts of the face.