Animation Process
Research
How did we get here? Well, first we had to look for some new footage that would be more stabilised and give me a clear cut image of my model and scenery, as my last mistake from my previous attempt relied on bad footage that required guesswork. So, after some online digging, I found a video that captured the movement of a boxer at a clean, fast, impactful pace that I wanted to imitate in my animation.
Staging & Animating
After importing footage to Autodesk Maya and setting up my character and scene, I began to keyframe the characters movements in sets of 12. Meaning every 12th frame I would pose the character, to capture key poses. This process gives me a rough concept of my characters movement and allows me to see how well they would flow together. Of course, I want the character to feel real, with stylised boxing feel being produced only by the characters design, but not his movement.
After completing the key poses, I would go back and apply filler keys or in between keys that (obviously) go in between all the 12 frame keys. So, I slowly started doing every 6 frames, for a well-rounded feeling and to provide a smoother effect that of course has a natural ‘humanesque’ essence to it. Then obviously doing extra filler keys in sets of 3, which would even further the detail of the character’s movement. But I wanted to ensure I was keeping on multiples of 3 since 12 and 24 are both evenly divisible by 3, meaning I would have even keyframe spacing and consistent movement with jerky animation.
Graph Editing
When it came to animating, we were ensuring to animate in steps, which would create an old-school type animation that means every frame is dependent on itself without any computer interpolation to fill in any gaps of animation, which is why the previous animations are quite snappy. An example of this in the curve graph can be seen in the screenshot below, and how the lines of the graph are in steps like a staircase and quite flat.
To create a bit of stylisation and make the character have some feeling to it as if it’s not a robot of some kind, we need to play with the graph creating a curve sheet, and tidy it up. And after doing that we come up with a graph that looks like this.
Some of the curves can be rounded out more to create a form of fluidity, but I sharpened some of the curves to keep some aspects of the snappiness in the movement, to make it feel like a slight cartoony character with realistic movement. This was more or less experimentation, to learn how the graph editor can manipulate the character’s movement and limit test the situation.