Run Cycle

For my running animation I wanted to try and do kind of what I did with my Idle animation, just start with one part and build it up to a complete animation using the principles of animation and my intuition which meant not using any particular reference, but I did use a standard running reference as an initial guide to just get the basic running frame set so that I could then tweak balance and squash and stretch and things later with a good foundation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=lCpotGr0TB4&feature=fvwp

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUOhwlcYzcc

Here is the completed animation, I'm very happy with the result. I had a few problems at the start but I managed to whittle them down over time. I had to move all of the key-frames down at first because they were all too far away and stretched out the the animation was really slow, that was an easy fix and mostly a result of me going in blind in the initial stages of setting up the foundation running cycle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ofaULoUq4w

 This is just a video showing my progress, it start out quite late because I just made this video using my available save-states at the end, and I forgot to save at all for quite a while up until I had a decent looking running animation foundation.

Updated Videos for Previous Animations

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc3-9S6PJxA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oxf7Jlu_mA

Idle cycle

With the idle cycle I kind of went in blind, I thought it I ended up using a reference I would just be copying it and it wouldn't be very interesting, so I just chose a thing for him to be doing (stretching his back) and animated around that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnbS2C1v7zQ

Since I didn't have a reference this time around I actually found myself referring to the 12 principles of animation when deciding 'how can I get this to look right' particularly squash & stretch and anticipation.

There was an added element with the idle cycle that wouldn't really be present in the walk and run cycle which I found quite interesting, in the running and walking cycle moom is constantly doing something, but in the idle cycle there is a large chunk where he wouldn't actually be doing any thing in particular so I found it quite fun moving him around subtly and making him look around before cycling back to the stretch animation.

Walk Cycle: exhausted

I have completed my first animation cycle, it is a tired walk cycle based on one of my earlier poses.

The video file is really poor quality with artefacts all over the place so it's not very clear but I think the animation it's self is clear enough.

Previously I had issues with animating everything at once and then getting a little bit overwhelmed and not knowing where to animate each thing, and animating everything into the same key-frames which really wasn't working, so this time I just animated one thing at a time, I first animated the legs.

I used my images that I collected from the walking video as reference which was very helpful in the end, by analysing each frame I could see in detail which body part was moving and how each body part affected others, how each movement helped to balance etc.

In my last walking animation I mentioned that I was trying to exaggerate slightly but that I went a bit overboard, I think in this animation I managed to exaggerate some of the movements yet not going over-the-top.

Exhausted Walking animation key-frame reference.

I took the most interesting walking animation video and slowed it down in VLC player so that it would show the video frame-by-frame and took what I thought were the most important frames (or key frames) and put them together in an image, I can now use these images as reference in my own animation and to help me decide of poses for the main key frames.

Walking poses

 I tried posing Moom using the references I'd collected, I think it helped to kind of observe some of the subtleties that I might not have notices just by looking at the videos.

This first post is just a normal walk, I might have overdone the angle of the hand but other than that I think it was okay.

This second pose is of an exhausted walking style.

I think next I will have a go at creating some poses from my imagination and using some other more interesting photo references.

Running animation sketch

I found that modelling poses into key frames on Maya probably wouldn't be the easiest way of experimenting with the stages of an animation, so I decided to just sketch out roughly the key moments in a cycle as that might help me know before hand what pose I am going to put where, it also give me a better sense of timing, rather than just guessing.

I might want to do one with a walk animation too since I will probably by animating that first, but before I will do the poses so that I know what kind of walking style I will be doing.

Two Roles in the Games Industry

The first role I will be exploring is the Audio Engineer.

Audio Engineer is kind of more of a technical job rather than artistic, they oversee all of the equipment used and they dictate the overall sound of the game, but don't generally have anything to do with the soundtrack, which was surprising to me as I thought that that would be one of their main responsibilities.

When games were still a young medium the Audio Engineer didn't have a very demanding job, aside from the music in a level there wasn't much more needed, usually synthesised sounds were used to imitate real sounds, recordings were very rarely used an it a lot of cases the audio design (besides the music soundtrack) was handled by the programmers and coders.

The next role is the Technical Director.

The Technical Director is quite similar to the Audio Engineer in the sense that they are both uncreative roles in the process and the Technical Director mainly centred around keeping everything running smoothly, again something that surprised me, by the titles I would have thought that it was a job that involved dictating the programming team and having a major role in the dynamics and game-play in a game, but is rather a job that mainly involves  keeping people in the studio and partners of the company connected and in-sync.

As the games industry has grown it has developed from an environment where a few people in a studio would make a game by themselves and it wouldn't be all that expensive and the risk wasn't that high; if a game didn't do well they could try and make another one to make their money back, but as the industry has grown, demands have grown and teams have gotten a lot bigger and the risks have greatly increased, studios can hardly afford a game not doing well on release lest they go bankrupt. As a result of things getting a lot more complicated the need for someone to keep everyone connected and in line has become very important.

Collection of Reference: Idle

Idle Animation references are kind of difficult to find by just searching, so for now I am just going to search for pre-existing video game idle animations from youtube but as with the others I'm going to still keep an eye out for good references in other videos that I watch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGn2cgQYszY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHor-NXzzuc

I like this one because it is just a simple animation of the character just standing, without any quirky moves or anything, it should be useful for the parts in the idle animation where the character is standing relatively still 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtDRexz_jeo

Collection of Reference: Walking

I found a great channel on youtube with lots of reference of animations, Here are a few of the Walking animations I found.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBkJY86tZRE

Most of them also have grids like this which is helpful as it shows you with precision where each part of the body is relative at any given frame.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8Veye-N0A4

I thought that this video in particular was interesting since in the context of Games Animation having an 'exhausted' animation is almost always a good idea in any game that involves stamina, when the character runs out of stamina and has to recharge they might use an 'exhausted' walk cycle until they can run again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpfoARyxQpc&list=PL7D5407291C669EA6

Collection of Reference: Running

To get me started I thought I would start with 'running' reference as I thought it would be quite easy to find a variety different running styles and speeds, the first thing that pops into my mind when I think about running is the same as anyone else, Tom Cruise, so I looked for a clip of Tom cruise running montages on youtube and here is one that I found, the problem is that most of them are head on but they are still good:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJdMDvjfyQ0

And of course Usain Bolt, This would be an example of a highly perfected and efficient running style used my athletes, but might not work as a normal character running animation, still useful but perhaps I need some reference of regular people running too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MC_t8MfGHMQ

It's actually really hard to find videos of regular people running, so for now I just wanted to find one sample of an actual video game Running animation, I remember enjoying the animations in Dead Space a lot so I'm using Issac Clarkes running animation from the game:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DmsDICPnjg

EDIT

After finding the reference youtube channel I want to now add one of the running animations from there:

Animating MooM

Before creating a finished animation I started a few that were ditched and never saved, but my first finished animation went pretty well I think, I call it a finished animation simply as it creates a complete loop.

First thing that comes to my head is that I will need to learn to loop the animation for next time, but for now this should be fine.

Overall I'm fairly happy with the way this animation turned out although there are some glaring problems that I will need to learn from for next time, first of all he kicks his legs forward to far and not back enough, and he doesn't really lift his feet off of the floor which is particularly a problem with he is bringing his back foot forward as the maintained contact would mean that he was sliding his feet across the floor which is unnatural or almost like he were walking backwards.

While it was kind of intentional I also kind of over did the squash and stretch and movement up & down and side-to-side, I wanted the animation not to look stiff and to really exaggerate the movements so that I could then tone them down in later iterations if needed, and given the speed Moom should be walking here it certainly does need toning down, but regardless if it were done on purpose I acknowledge it's something that need improvement.

This was the beginning of one of my animations, my intention was to kind of set up the animation with the first frame but I don't think that worked especially with an animation that would require so much movement as a running animation, I think next time I should start at a more neutral position, although as it is supposed to be a cycle that might not work. another problem I think I had is that I tried to animate every little movement at one time which may have complicated things for me, maybe next time I should just focus on the basic animation and the add in the other details later (Which is what I did with the walk cycle.)

Including this screenshot gave me an idea though, maybe I will play around with simply posing Moom, almost like a silhouette stage before I move onto actually animating the pose, I should create about 10 poses for each animation (Walk, run, Idle) and then choose a few maybe that I want to actually animate.