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Blender Journals Stuff I made

Mopey walk

Here’s a mopey slightly depressed walk. For today’s session i pored over video reference for 2/3 of it, then spent the remaining 1/3 animating in fits and starts. It was worth really pounding the video reference for as long as i did because it taught me a few things about how to animate someone who’s tired.

In a nutshell it feels like tired people have much less functional motor control, and their actions are weirdly more violent and at the mercy of physics than someone who’s more alert and has more vigour in their body. A tired person will kind of fling their limbs around whereas an awake person will guide their limbs to where they need to go much more precisely. Like, the leg action of my reference walk is swing hip forward, swing lower leg forward, hover for a fraction of a second then drop the foot onto the ground, sending a shock up the body that ripples subtly up the flesh for 1/5 of a second or so. When the leg’s made contact, the knee’s pretty much locked and there’s a heap of side-to-side motion, almost like walking is balancing on poles. It’s like a Frankenstein walk, except the top of the body hangs down too.

But it wasn’t just motion analysis drawing lines on the computer; i was doing sketches of poses too, just to try to capture the physical attitude of moping. I’m bad at sketching and i was bitching about it on Twitter a lot until i had my eureka moment – stop drawing what’s in the picture, start drawing what the picture’s saying.

I like the 9B woodless pencil and smearing pen as media, too. I just hate trying to sketch from real life for the time being because i’m so bad at it. Not to worry – i have a book.

The motion analysis i did within Blender was also much better this time around – i think i found a bug as well where if you have too many grease pencil layers open, one gets shifted off the stack interface and can’t be retrieved. But yeah – lots of layers of grease pencil plus a movie clip on loop sitting behind the 3D viewport is fantastic – scribbling stick figure abstractions over video is a superb way to see what’s going on.

As for the walk itself? Pretty damn pleased with it. The sense of weight in my walks is improving even if it’s still got a long way to go, but as long as i keep at it i’ll get there.

Categories
Blender Journals Stuff I made

Take

A take is a violent shocked reaction. This is my first shot at doing one just around the bust area. For now i’m just sticking with a fairly standard issue ga-WUH?! reaction instead of a far out Tex Avery take where the character bounces off the moon in surprise. Turns out this rig has lots of cartoonish deformability built into it. Look very closely and you’ll even see derp eyes for a couple of frames.

I started on sort of a shuffling, depressed walk but i bailed on it. Need to go back and restudy the literature on walks. Maybe try working with reference footage again.

Tomorrow’s my designated break day then it’s back to animating again on Sunday.

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Blender Journals Stuff I made

Dance!

I was out of ideas tonight and having to do a super quick animation sesh from having much of my evening occupied by other things. But every minute of experience helps…

I tried to copy some rhythmic bobbing for lack of ideas and inspiration but it all went very bad. 2D does not translate well to 3D. The rules are really different. Also i think i have an innate tendency for snappy motion right now – it makes conveying weight a bit tricky. Need to work on it. This motion feels a little bit too quick, perhaps. Too weightless.

I quite like the slight tense wiggle in the head. It’s like he’s screaming.. so tense and horrified.

Right now i’m still at the stage of encountering lots of interesting unexpected accidents though and i’m happy to keep doing that for a while as a matter of playful experience. It’s a matter of studiously going back through the graph editor and dope sheet and discovering what makes these interesting unexpected accidents feel how they do, then learning what i did so i can do it again if i want to.

Oh and to those of you who will never sleep again after seeing this: i’m so, so sorry.

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Blender Journals Stuff I made

Zombie

So i couldn’t think of what to animate today until the last minute. I went with a zombie walk because i’m feeling more comfortable with walks after having done a couple.

My animation doesn’t have a lot of weight in it yet but i feel like i’m getting better at spotting and attending to glitchiness. Everything’s still a bit stiff and weightless right now but i suspect walks show the (in)ability to convey weight in animation fairly brutally. I’ll keep at it, then.

Categories
Blender Journals Stuff I made

Ditch

I was pretty hard on myself yesterday, i suppose.

After yesterday, i tried another animation depicting throwing. This time i decided to dial the poses up to eleven, ignore any and all video reference in favour of intuition and just have fun with it.

Result? Twice the number of frames, much more character in the motion, a couple of useful rigging tricks mid-animation and the end result is just nicer, i think. Less adherence to grim reality. Yesterday, the guy was sort of throwing something floatily. Today he’s fully ditching it. (It being Suzanne. Can’t have a Blender test without Suzanne.) The throw reads so much better it’s like night and day.

Still can’t quite get the hang of making things fly through the air and bounce though – they hang in the air too long, getting a convincing bounce eludes me.. ah well! Comes with practice, i guess.