Thought I’d write a progress report since I’ve just been getting on with animating and don’t have much else work to post.
I’ve not got 4 out of 5 of my animatics done. I will start considering the last animation soon but would like to do a desk flip animation.
I’ve done the most amount of animation work on my drunk guy walking into a pole animation. I’ve animated the part of him stumbling up to the pole and smacking his face against it with a bit of dizzy recoil. The walk cycle was mostly taken straight from the animatic with the large strides and staggered timing. I made sure he wasn’t going to anticipate walking into the pole as in his mind he would be near it. The impact with the pole is just a head smack and recoil to the point where his head bends right back (its okay, its a cartoon). I’m pretty happy with it so far. Next I will add arm movements into the recoil as if he was about to fight someone before falling back on himself and falling unconscious.
In the sword swinging animation I’ve got the character bending down (apparently that’s not easy to do but I was happy with the result I got) to pick up the sword. Its slightly than he imagines so he doesn’t just pick it up in one action, he sort of retracts and pulls it up a second time with more force from his body. I’m switching the arms from FK (forward kinematics) to IK (inverse kinematics) the moment he makes contact with the sword so that I can move the sword around and his arm follows. Meaning I can animate the sword and the character will be dragged along with it. I’ve used a parent constraint to bind the sword to the hand controller but I need to figure out how to apply it to the point after he makes contact with the sword.
I will be using Maya 2013 for the spell casting animation in order to use the Mery rig (only works with 2013+) as it has more advanced hand controllers allowing for easier animation when it comes to conjuring the spell itself.
I’ve also built the scene for the stream crossing animation which I will start this week.