Introduction
I finally started to make idle animation. The last animation took me too much time, so I am not confident to complete this animation in a short time. But I will try my best to make it.
Process
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P05qRtTwpM8
This is the first instructional video I watched, Don’t Let Your Character Die! Keep Alive Workflow. It is not a tutorial dedicated to idle, but it has two aspects that are very interesting:
- The shoulder movement is like a clock, but it is not so exaggerated. I want to adjust translate and rotation at the same time.
- The eyes can adjust some small reflections, and when the eyes are opened, they follow the movement of the upper eyelashes, and the pupils first contract and then expand. This is a very detailed thing.
Next I learned how to make idle animation with Joyswork animation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ro4WCeeN5E
This is the same as my character, holding a sword, but her weapon is set with the constraint attribute, and I have to set it separately. God, this idle animation was made too natural! I hope I can make such an effect.
- Set main pose.
- Set core animation and core rotationX need offset back 6 frames. It means to adjust translateY (up and down) and Z (left and right) first, then adjust rotationX, and let it offset back 6 frames.
- Set spine rotation animation and offset. It means to select spine controllers, and then set only rotationX (rotation back and forth) one by one, and each controller has 3 frames of offset.
- Set clavicle animation and offset. But here he adjusts rotationZ (left and right rotation), and continues to offset according to the chest controller.
5.Set neck and head animation then offset. The neck and head controllers adjust rotationY (head up and down).
6.Add shoulder and arm animation then offset and add wrist and fingers animation. Try to move your arms down and back as much as possible.
AnimSchool’s tutorial also makes sense:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy9jooLpb04
He reminded me that I should make the idle cycle as long as possible, and two or three cycles would give the character some different small actions. I also checked Sun Wukong’s idle animation, it even has more than 300 frames!
Tang also described idle animation in detail:
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1aE411Z7tU?p=27
He made the following points:
- The curve of the Hips controller should be a closed circle, and shaking back and forth is greater than shaking left and right, unless I am a drunk or dancing person.
- Make the effect of breathing as far as possible to fix the position of the hand, and then let the chest cavity upward when inhaling, and vice versa.
Okay, now I start making animations.
I want the studio library to load the idle pose I made before, but it failed and I don’t know how to adjust it. But it was successful the second time, except that PoleArm needs to be adjusted by myself.
First of all, I adjust the hips. According to the method of Joyswork animation, I adjusted translateXY and rotationX, and made the rotationX offset, the contrast effect with and without offset is super obvious!
Then I adjusted the animations of spine and neck separately. This is not difficult. Just follow the tutorial. Originally, the head movement will be larger. I didn’t do this in order to make Xin look more serious.
While adjusting my hand, I found that my hand actually popped! By checking the motion tail of each controller, I finally found that there was a problem with the neck controller. It may be that the key frame of translate is at 1F, which causes problems with the movement of the controllers in the neck controller subset.
Deleted the wrong key frame and got the following animation.
Then I added the details of the hair and eyes.
When I turned on the sword layer, I found that the position of the sword was shifted because the position of Xin’s hand was changed due to the offset, so I re-adjusted the position of the sword and used aTools’ temporary custom pivot. I don’t know if this will go wrong in the later blending.
In addition, I increased it to 300 frames and added the head-turning animation. Here I used redirection so that the original loop animation would not be interrupted.
This is the final result and it looks pretty good!
Conclusion
Idle animation is faster and better than I thought! Thanks to the many tutorials I watched in advance. I also learned a more professional method of adjusting the graph editor. You can directly select the required key frames and drag curves to speed up the animation. I think I have to learn more about using the graph editor to make animations, and I can’t always rely on timeline and channel box.