iAnimate Assignment 3: Arm Snippet and Stretch

Now that I've been launched on assignment 4 for Workshop 2 from iAnimate I'm posting about assignment 3.  The assignment was our first in-depth study into the limits to which our bodies move; we were to push our character to the limits of their rig with reaching and stretching animations.  We would only have 2 weeks for this assignment, as opposed to the three weeks were given previously, something I drastically underestimated.

The first part of our assignment was the Snippet.  This snippet was one that I've been looking forward to: the arms and shoulders.  Mainly this is because I never really understood how they move that well and I was quite interested in learning their proper movements.  The reference we were to use here was a guy raising is arms and dropping it - acting aside, it was essentially the exact same movement that I utterly failed on while producing Ember and ultimately hand it off to another animator.  With the proper instruction and education, I was able to get the motion, and now feel much more comfortable with the arms and shoulders now.  Unfortunately, due to lack of time, a failure on my part,  I did not get the snippet to a polish that I like, though intend to clean it up shortly when I find the time.  The problem here still lies with the timing as the arms comes into the swing and the settle.

The reference video that I was given to work with was reaching into cupboards and reaching up to a tree.  When I first got it, my first thought was to shoot my own reference, but essentially keep it the same.  I had the idea to have this one character, "Jackal" who is an awkward character quite similar to gru from Despicable Me, reach up and fail and to grab a cat in a tree with no intention of coming down.  The idea would be funny.  Unfortunately, the idea was shot down by teacher.  He told me that Jackal's rig really wasn't built to work well with this particular assignment, he was a great acting character, not so much a mechanics character.  So back to the drawing boards I went, and instead decided to shoot myself doing a simple yoga transition from a simple standing stance into a full back bend, then coming down into a forward fold and walking out to downward dog.  The whole reference was about 9 seconds.  When I showed my teacher the reference he said "Great, go for it."

The animation itself was going to be both simple and difficult, I ended up using Jane since this was whom I had used for the Snippet and knew she would have needed flexibility built into the rig to accomplish the motions.  Since it was a yoga move, the animation itself would be symmetrical, which is generally frowned upon in animation because it leads to boring film, nothing would really be offset, and this was concerning me at first; but my teacher commented saying that typically yes that's true, due to the nature of this particular movement, the symmetry would add to the animation and give it a desired sense of balance... so I was pretty happy with that.  The next problem I had to solve was how I would approach the arms.  Ideally I would leave them FK mode, because it's nice and natural and follows rotations from the joints, but in this case I would at least need to be IK for some of the time since I would be walking on my hands.  I've done many animations where I switch between IK/FK and honestly I really quite hate it.  This rigs actually do have a really nice switch built in that makes things easier that honestly I probably should have used in retrospect, but, the purpose of this animation was of pushing the rigs to the limits and really stretching them out.  I knew that this wouldn't really be all that possible within FK, so IK it was.

After first critique my animation was looking alright and my teacher liked, plenty of criticisms but that was to be expected.  I decided over the next week to change the camera to a more appealing and dynamic angle.  It was so much better and also really exposed mechanics.  At next critique my teacher's first response was "Holy crap, you changed the camera... don't do that." but almost immediately after though commented that I absolutely made the right choice in this particular case for all the right reasons.  He then told me to go ahead and try and push the rig even further and try to cheat the camera to give it an even more extreme pose.  I was all good to try it so push I did and it really worked out better.

The whole animation itself was rather a difficult process, fraught with tons of pops and awkward bends but eventually I managed to smooth most of it out into a nice stretching animation.  I'm still not that satisfied with it and intend to clean it up, but I really lost track of time during this assignment period and didn't devote the time it needed.  I intend to clean it up soon but for now it is... acceptable.