Week 2: Ball an Tail Lecture and Animation

This week animation features the following principles: Overlap, Follow Through and Settle and Rest.

Overlap: connects things moving at different rates to each other.

Follow Through: the extra movement after stopping due to force.

Settle and Rest: which is not edwin the primary set of principles but it is part of the letters. It determines how things come to a natural stop after movement.

All animation, for both simple and complex characters, feature this basic breakdown especially if loose items are involved, such as tails: Leading action, which is the part of a character which drives the rest of the character to follow; a Secondary (following) action, that catches up with the primary.

As it happens for each principle it derives from an observational study carried in the “real world”. The human body presents overlapping actions and follow through movements, involving elements such as arms, legs, hands, feet which move at different rates to the movement of the torso and of the pelvis: when somebody moves is impossible to stop without an extra movement or coming to a natural stop. Typically the pelvis (root) will lead and the upper chest, head, neck, arms, legs, hands, feet, hair and clothing will consequentially play catch up to that primary movement.

Practical examples:

Overlap and Follow through

An animal tail such as the one of a squirrel. In this case the squirrel’s body dictates the movement of the tail creating overlapping actions (other overlapping action would be the arms and the legs too since they are moving at a different rate to the body). Moreover, the squirrel motion (leap) is dictated by the pelvis, the root. Which means that the tail will therefore follow through when the body will stop due to the force employed finding a natural rest. The tail while moving offset will alternate “c” curves to “s” curves.

Another example,e is the overlapping movement of a bear’s belly: it catches up with the leading action dictated by the bears root movement, this action is also called drag effect. So, when the bear stops his belly passes the stopping point of the root body following through that action.

Settle and Rest

In a character ending jump will be natural rest standing in a stationary neutral pose after applying a force and landing.

A notable example features the pendulum and the chain animations: they both feature a dissipation, pose to pose principle, arcs of the movement, slow in and slow out of the action, follow through and settle and rest. The chain, however is much more complex adding overlapping actions since each link moves at a different rate.

However, they are deceptively difficult: they should not have hard hits or sudden stopping leading to a natural swing and find a natural settle and rest without any vibrating stop.

Following this theory I am going to an animate a character with a body of a ball which also has a tail, overlapping the action of the main body.

The character rig present the following controls:

the ground control, which is non-keyable, to place the character in the scene before starting animating it. (the triangle at the bottom)

the translate and rotate controls of the character. (the circle around the body)

The squash and stretch controls )the circle on top of the character)

And the tail controls which can be separated to use individually. (the for squares around the tail)

Process:

The first step would be positioning the ball character into the space: moving it forward and up through the space of the scene and set all the keys. After the moment created is adjusted in the graphic editor using weighted tangents to shape the curves created by translating the ball in the “Y” axis so the it will spend more time in the air while jumping. The motion trail will help visualise the moment throughout the process.

The second step is the rotation of the ball while moving in the arcs of the movement in order to get the squash and stretch controls parallel to the arcs themselves (just like it happens in the bouncing ball animation).

After that the ball is squashed and stretched following the movement of the character

Once the animation of the ball is set the poses for the tail are created: an initial pose is set to add a natural touch and whip action for the tail when the character jumps is made. Throughout the movement I tried to focus on the tail curves that should create while moving (s and c curves): in the last few seconds of the animation I struggled to make the tail coming to a rest making the tail alternate between “c” and “s” curve shapes, since finding the correct order was hard to me.

As it is shown in the final animation, I tried to make the tail whip before the character reaches the ground. I made sure that the tail bits movement overlap to create a natural flow. In the graphic editor I polished the curves breaking the tangents and adjusting them to make them smoother.

In this second attempt I moved the second stone slightly to the right, making the character jump side to side: so the angle o the hop had to be edited and the tail movement too since it should flip from side to side as well in the opposite direction of the body and slightly delayed too compared to the body. I used the first animation as a starting point: I have first worked on the body making sure that in the first frame was tilted on the left to jump towards the side step on its right and when in the air starting tilting towards left so that when it reaches the ground would be already rotated towards the stone on its left (same thing next but opposite direction for the last jump). Regarding the tail I made it rotate in the y axis in the opposite direction of the one of the body and also made it rotate it with a slight delay too; moreover I have used the rotate z to emphasise the whip towards the side of the body in the whole animation. I also added a moment for the tail at the end so that it would follow the principle of follow through action, since it moves after that the body stops, and made it settle and rest with a natural flow.

This is a plan I have designed before starting the second animation with a break down of the rotation of the body and the tail of the character.

At the end I also tried to work in the node editor to add to the stone a squash and stretch for when the character jumps on it. I used the node connection in order to maintain the volume of the stone when scaled in the y axis: I have added a normaliser node, that corrects any value, a node that puts the value to square root and one that divide the value into 1 and linked it back to the scale x and z of the object. I after animated the keys.