Introduction
With the problem that I did not solve in blocking, I finally wanted to spline and polish my animation. I know this will take me a lot of time, because there are too many voguing’s gestures. Once you do not grasp the timing, the whole animation will look strange. But I am confident that if I am patient, I can make this work as perfect as possible.
Tips:
- If the curve of a point in the Motion trail is irregular, there may be a problem with the tangent in the graph editor.
Problems:
1. There are some key frames on Motion trails that cannot make the trails smoother. (131F in the right hand)
2. With the rendering farm, you cannot always choose the perspective you want to render.
Process
I first go to the graph editor to make the curve smoother. Because I studied Maya’s animation well before doing this assignment (please go to my seif-study in blog to read for details), and I am more comfortable with adjusting the curve.
Then I need to confirm the position of the waist. I switch on motion trails to confirm whether the waist movement is smooth, and at the same time make slight adjustments in the graph editor. After doing everything, I have to go to the main cam to check if my character is balanced after adjustment.
If there is a place that is not an arc, I choose to add more key frames to adjust the arc. This is a very complicated task, because once I add new key frames, I have to constantly adjust them to make the trails smoother. In addition, I have to go to the graph editor to re-adjust my curve. But if the animation can be made more natural, I think such steps are necessary.
In this way, I finished the polish of the waist.
The next step is to adjust the legs. In fact, the blocking of the legs has been done well, but after I spline and polish the waist. There will be some small bugs in the legs, such as shaking inexplicably. In addition, although the speed is very fast, I follow the reference to adjust the foot position too much, which will make the character appear to be sliding. I want to solve these problems.
For example, the right knee suddenly bends because I moved the waist, and I adjusted the waist again to make it normal.
Ray’s toes were originally tilted up, which would be abrupt when making tiptoe movements, so I adjusted the toe controller to adapt to this movement.
The last leg is the most troublesome. The character not only has serious sliding steps, but also has mechanical legs that are too high. The trail is straight. But through the method taught by tutor, it is particularly convenient to adjust in the graph editor. I no longer have to worry about the role of sliding.
I have mastered a new knowledge, which can answer my previous questions. If a point on the motion trail shows an irregular shape, it means that its curve in the graph editor is not smooth. For example, in the 480F, I originally smoothed it by adding a few more points, but it was useless. Until I found its tangent in the graph editor was weird, it was resolved after modification.
Do not forget about overlapping, especially when the legs move significantly.
The overall adjustment of the legs is the same as that of the waist.
Now it is the step of adjusting the hand. For me, how to key the hand movement has always been a problem. Because under the condition of FK, the arm position is easy to change with the movement of the waist. Once you get to the place that needs to be fixed, you need to constantly adjust. Secondly, voguing is a dance that pays special attention to arm movement. Whether the details of arm movement are qualified means whether my character dance is qualified.
I have to say that this is really a troublesome job, because maybe the rotation of the arm will completely change after a certain point in the spline, which is not what it was before. There is also a problem I encountered, that is, how to adjust the curve of the palm, because I can only change the position of the arm by rotating, but I am inexperienced and do not know how to rotate it correctly.
In order not to break the model, I had to change the posture of my arm. Actually, I didn’t adjust it when blocking. Secondly, no matter how the position of the arm is adjusted in 131F, the trail cannot be made natural. Maybe I have to ask Luke how to adjust it.
Now it is the final step, adjusting the direction of the head and eyes. But it was midnight when I was doing this, and my brain could not keep up with the speed of the animation, so I just made a rough adjustment, and when I saw the output, I thought it was ok.
I exported a version.
The next day, I looked at the final playblast and I was very disappointed, because without the reference, I did not expect some movements to be too fast, the timing was not well controlled, and the blocking was not even natural. I listed the following questions:
1. 16F left hand is severely twisted.
2. 62F shakes his left hand too fast.
3. The 86F the head got stuck in rotation with the right hand.
4. The 95F head popped.
5. 115F right hand palm has been changing.
6. The right hand of 121F popped when switching between FK and IK. (unsolved)
7. The 130F head rotates too fast and it seems to pop.
8. 157F will look better when the palm of the right hand touches the thigh.
9. 185F right hand palm popped.
10. 250F leg rotation is not very natural.
11. 278F the left hand popped obviously.
12. The two arms of 346F moved in the wrong position, and the gesture became too fast.
13. The left arm of 430F moves in the wrong position.
14. The arms of the 470F can be extended even more.
Regarding the control of timing, I have a deep understanding of polish 346F. After I adjusted the gestures, I felt that the speed was too fast when I looked the playblast to check his drooping arms. So, I went back to Maya and moved his arms so that there was enough movement distance and the speed would slow down.
Now Ray looks more natural!
Now starting to set up the scene, I want to make the character dancing in a dark bar. But there are no ready-made scenes on the Internet, I can only download some objects to build by myself.
Among them, I used a special effect because I want to make a stage curtain effect, which requires ncloth in FX. I first created a plane, subdivided the number of faces, and created ncloth and transform constraints. When the animation is played, the cloth will have a wrinkle effect, and then clear the history at the frame I need, export the obj file, and then import it again into the scene.
Although I have forgotten how to render with Arnold, after consulting the information, I created a spotlight as a secondary light source to test the effect of Arnold’s Atmosphere. But my computer rendering is too slow! This is a waste of my time. I had to only render region to increase the speed. And in Arnold, I have to adjust the intensity of the spotlight to a very high value to be able to see the light changes clearly. I do not know what’s going on, which means that next time I should go to teach myself Maya lighting effects.
Although the node of Atmosphere was created, the diffusion of volume fog was too serious. I just wanted to create a glow effect, so I went to test whether I could create a LightDecay by using Light Filters.
In any case, I rendered the final product, a total of 11.5G files! This is my biggest rendering so far!
Conclusion
I know that I still have to go for improvement in this work. For example, I am still very unskilled in keying the keyframe of arms. So, I believe that if I am diligent in asking tutor for advice and earnestly learning basic animation knowledge, I can make more excellent animations.