This challenge is an ‘upscale’ of the first body mechanics challenge and the goal here is join motions. For example, running and jumping or walking and then sitting. You should focus on movement, not performance (acting and pantomime).
Advanced Body Mechanics (Blocking Out): Using your footage and stepped keyframes, establish the ‘storytelling’ poses, trajectory of the COG/Root of the person’s motion, and the arcs of the spine. You may wish to ‘draw on your footage’ to explore these and use your footage (as an image sequence) to rotoscope in Maya. This will form the block out stage of your animation. Whilst not complete, the DNA of the motion and arcs should be clear at this stage.
1) Building upon your blocked out animation, add breakdown/ inbetween poses to help complete arcs (motion) and give rhythm to the animation.
I first switched in the animation settings the stepped keyframes to create the blocking pose of the animation.
To help with the set of keyframes O have created a character set allowing me to select all the controls at once using the script editor and created a character set with the global control I have created.
I next started to block the keys on 8’s and after the breakdowns on 4’s following the image plain I have imported in the viewport.
One aspect I have noticed is that compared to the first part of body mechanics, I was faster and I had a clearer process in mind on how to approach the animation, both knowing what to do, such as check for the pole vectors position, start to build a pose from the root control, and what to avoid, such as unnecessary rotation of controls adding not too many keyframes: in general I anticipated the possible mistakes I could have committed.
I have also created the ball animation and for the first part I parented the hand control with the ball and I animated the keys for the parenting turned it off with the character throws the ball in the air.
2) Convert you stepped animation to Spline and clean up your curves in the Graph Editor (be careful not to over polish)
I cleaned the animation and the splines starting from the root control.
converted stepped into spline and polish everything knee popping caused by sudden changes in rotation of the feet
A difficult part was to establish the hand and elbow pole control position for the hand that smashes the ball.
After I checked the Root arcs were clean before polishing the spine, checking for ‘weight, force, and impact’. With the help of a grease pencil I have designed the curve path of the spine in the key moments of the movement. I have also checked with the reference for the right balance of the body and the correct orientation as the character smashes the ball and I have noticed that the character was not rotated enough.
Finally, I checked the arcs of the limbs to ensure the mechanics and forces were strong.
While blocking the animation I have noticed that I have added too many keyframes in some parts, so I have corrected this and got rid of unnecessary keys.
I have also corrected I slight knee popping in the same foot that was caused both from the root and the heel roll sudden changes happening in near keys.
In the right foot there was a popping (it rotated forward/back in a repeated poses).
So I tried to spread the rotation in time and Adjusted also the translation of the foot too since it was wrong and positioned too much forward and was not contributing to the balance of the body.
Fo the hand that is smashing the ball I thought at first to replace it with FK controls to solve th elbow popping problem it had. However I tried to polish it first at this stage as much as possible by understanding its dynamic too through the reference and by doing the movement myself and I was able to find the correct path for the elbow.
3) Check the COG/Root arcs (motion path) are clean before polishing the spine, checking for ‘weight, force, and impact’ where required.
gamble lock two circular controls rotating on the same plain object can move unexpectedly in between two keyframes
In fact that is what happened to the hand smashing the ball so while rotating to of the rotate splines overlapped (x and Y) so I also tried to adjust them in the graph.
4) Global retiming
After I polished everything I decided to do a global retiming which helped the fluidity and added a more natural effect to the animation.
5) Playblast & add After Effects Pixel Motion Blur
After the retiming I playblasted the animation chosing the framing of the camera and added a motion blur effect in after effects.