Introduction
Because I have been working on cooperative projects recently, I am only now starting to check the latest video sent to me by Luke. I want to say something here, thank you Luke.
Process
The following are the questions shown in the video:
1. Tom’s waist moves vertically too fast. I should let its waist drop more. But at this time I finally found out why I can’t freely adjust my points in the graph editor! Because I switch off this button! ! ! Damn! I’m so stupid! ! !
2. Luke is still modifying the hip controller. In this curve, it is obvious that Tom’s waist has almost no movement. Besides, I can’t remember how I adjusted the hip controller at the time. Obviously, when Tom needed to lift his body, I let him drop, which was against the principle. Moreover, I also keyed a lot of unnecessary frames, which are over-animating, so Luke deleted them one by one for me. Luke suggested that I make the animation simpler and smoother, and keep the body moving up and down. By the way, in order for the graph editor to be more convenient for me to adjust, I also checked how to adjust the length of its timeline.
3. Next, Luke starts to adjust translate X. On some major poses, Luke adjusted the hip controller and knee controller to make Tom’s actions more exaggerated.
4. Now Luke has started to modify Tom’s feet. To be honest, I am totally arbitrarily keying the feet of the controllers. He first slowly adjusted the controllers of Translate X and Translate Z, but finally deleted them because they were moving.
5. The next thing that needs to be adjusted is the wrist, which is also a very important place. Luke felt that I had too many problems when adjusting, so he told me some very basic principles, some principles that I have forgotten in performing animation: animators should follow the performance to make animations, not their own guesses. If I don’t have fifteen years of experience as an animator, I should pay attention to my performance. For example, on the wrist, besides shaking my hand when shooting the reference video, I should pay more attention to the overlap of my hand.
After watching Luke’s demo, I started to modify my animation frame by frame. The first of course is to make the left and right hands more overlapping. At the beginning, I felt that Tom’s right hand was keyed well by me, but his left hand was still a bit stiff. After I adjusted it, the effect was significantly better.
When modifying the right hand alone, I think I shouldn’t just follow Luke’s adjustments, but understand why he did it. For example, I directly interrupted Tom’s wrist in some frames, which is unrealistic, so I changed all these poses.
6. Luke finally returned to translate Z to adjust the hip controller. I guess this is to keep Tom balanced when he moves his body.
Tom’s right hand is for me to modify it myself. For this reason, I keep observing my arm and want to make a better effect. But Maya is running very slowly at this time, I have no choice but to restart, and the saved files are gone, which makes me very frustrated.
In this review, I found that I have a big problem:
1. Luke reminded me many times to pay attention to elbow controllers, but I still relied on my imagination to adjust and did not respect the facts.
2. The balance of the role is broken. This is a mistake I never made before.
3. I often break the joints of the character. In fact, this was taught to me by my previous tutor. This is a way to generate overlap. I don’t know if this is correct.
4. I spent too much time on this animation. To be honest, this modification took me more than ten hours, which is not normal!
I reported my question to Luke.
Soon, Luke replied to me, the following is his reply, I think this is also useful for other students who want to do animation:
Hi Lucy, its fine. Sorry I have taken so long to get back to you. As for the performance animation you are getting better you just need to keep pushing on. Becoming an animator doesnt happen over night and it takes years to master the skills required to become an industry animator. A lot of the time it will feel like you are just making your animations worse and believe me this doesnt stop even when working on films. You just get used to it and find ways to refresh your brain and try again from a different approach. One of the things you cannot do is fall in to the trap of not wanting to delete animation and start over. Some times this actually helps starting over from scratch as it makes it easier to not make the mistakes you were trying to fix before.
As for time management you just need to break down your week in to what project you will work on for which days. This will make it easier to keep both projects progressing without one falling behind. Its really good you are working well with your collaboration team however just be sure to fill up your blog with a post for every week explaining what you have been working on and any research or testing you did. Finally make sure you are always reflecting on your progress on your blog. The blog is where all your marks come from so its crucial you show all the work you are doing on there. Quite a lot of people have let their blogs slip this term so please ensure you catch this up.
Conclusion
In this week’s adjustment, I learned not only academic knowledge, but also a deeper understanding of animators. I can’t expect myself to be able to do well in animation overnight, nor can I feel that I don’t have the talent to do animation just because I modify my animation time and time again, because animation takes time to practice, and it takes time to make progress. space. This is why I have the confidence to do animation again.