Animation Challenges

For the last 10 days since my last post I have been at work understanding some very important things for animation and while I have the basic knowledge of these things now I still have alot of things to learn to make it all better one of those things is obviously make a better mesh/rig or use a better one to learn with mainly the Royal Skies LLC one. (for now on I might just say RSLLC to make it easier to read/write)

A post or 2 two ago I mentioned the animation challenges that I would be doing and some of them where just thought up on the spot so I knew I wouldn't do those ones but the ones that I did end up doing where a basic walk cycle, crawling through a vent and opening a door now for the walk cycle I used both my rig and the RSLLC rig to see the difference between a pro rig and a novice one.

Now I colored both meshes in with a yellow/black color scheme to emulate a crash test dummy and the points I marked with black where the joints of the rigs so as to see the way they move easier.

To animate the walk cycle I used references which I had open on PureRef to get the keyframes and poses correct which went well I now know it goes contact, down, pass, up and then contact again however the timing seems to be a little fast it looks like 25FPS and so thats what I used but it still seems fast so learning proper timing should help.

As you can see the difference between the two meshes is astounding the RSLLC mesh still has snapping limbs because of the way I animated it but look how the mesh actually deforms when it moves its more fluid and less screwy thanks to all of its correction bones and drivers.

Once I completed the walk cycle I moved onto the next animation which was a bit more challenging and I should have just kept doing walk cycles a thousand times to get it all down better but I didn't so I just moved on and started the vent crawl animation.

While making it I did a few test renders and posted them on one of the discords I am a part of and got solid advice and help towards making the animations such as not to extend the limbs all the way and keep them slightly bent to avoid that sharp snapping motion that happens although I fixed this later on in the animations because at this point I was still trying to figure out what moves where and how.

The reason why I stopped and made a test render just before she gets out of the vent was because I didn't really know how to make her get out of the vent as obvious as it looks so I asked on discord for advice at this point which I got a great deal of replies.

Once I had the idea of how to make her get out I continued to animate till I had finished her getting out and standing up properly and all threw out making this animation I kept testing how the human body moves when making the movements I wanted my mesh to make on myself and watching to see how it all works which is a good practice.

now there was massive problems with this mesh deforming and the way it controls resulting in massive clipping threw the body all over the place and I couldn't really fix it because it stems from my bad mesh/rig and its all my fault.

I rendered out the animation using three cameras a front a rear and a POV although the POV is mostly just a grey vent it was cool to see it working and to be honest it was not hard to setup but its only a basic POV nothing special so I just tracked the camera to the headtracking controller.

For the last animation I took all that I had learned/understood from the previous animations to make that animation the best one I had made yet and while I still dont think its good because it does not have fluid movement its still by far the best animation I've done so far

Again I rendered out a test in Eevee to get advice on discord to which again I received a lot of support, advice and guidance which I thank everyone for ;3

For this animation I rendered out four cameras one each for the front and back views again one that follows her and pans around and another one that follows her and then stops when the door closes which gives you quite a range of views and angles to see the mesh.

For the strange wave at the end that my friend thought was a "victory dance" I didn't spend much time animating because I just wanted to add something random in at the end.

I was told to use the dopesheet/graph editor for better animation since it uses curves and such but it all looks like spaghetti especially since I have everything selected at once so I'll learn that for the future but I just ignored it for these animations.

For the vent animations frames 84 and 85 where massively different I think it had way too much movement for just 1 frame and I should have tweaked this but I never did so I'll keep it in mind for next time the Dopesheet probably could have solved this issue.

I did run into a small issue where my door handle vanished into the void when Changing the origin of the door and To fix it I just redid the animation since I couldn't figure out how to fix it.

I think that's everything I've done in the past week or so I'm now going to archive this project file and not use the mesh anymore and move onto another project to which I'm not sure yet most likely will be university work but for now I think that's all I have to say.