04/03/13 - FOF7, Silhouettes

My pipeline is rubbish. Really rubbish.

My technique is bad and needs improving.

These make my animation not up to scratch at all.

But on the bright side i can kind of see how to improve a little. I need to take it back a bit. start with blocking things out again because I've got into the bad habit of just starting animating. Its not working, it's messy and leaves my files and curves all over the place. I need to focus on getting the key poses blocked in before i can even think about the rest.

Work in progress video 1 for Fight or flight reaction 7: Extreme Flight.

I've done what i said and began blocking out the movement mainly paying attention to weighting and body language.

Have been struggling to fix my fear of turning a character by moving the Ctrl rig. I'm not sure why it was a fear but fixing it will work well in the long run.

Other things i need to consider is the cameras view of the NPC. How much of the body language is visible.

You can see his arm movements and that hes stumbling away but can you see the movements in the shoulders to protect his neck? I've decided to take some techniques from character design to try and help. When designing a character an important thing to consider is their silhouette. The silhouette can give away certain details of their personality even without the rest of the texture and detail being there.

Taken from bobjinx.blogspot.co.uk

 So to apply it to my animations I've recorded a play blast with the characters as silhouettes. If you can still tell what the action is and the reaction that results because of it then the animation is working.

Doing this has highlighted some odd arm movements while hes running away which i think is to do with the shoulder joint movements... think i want to improve the shoulder movement a bit too and exaggerate the anticipation before he starts to flee.

Tomorrow finish blocking out and move on to the next step.