Week 4: Weight Shift Animation

This is a video of a weight shift animation exercise done:

Like the Big Dog, I had difficulty making it appear as if gravity and weight is being applied. Regardless, with a bit of up-and-down movement, this was achieved and added in an extra movement in the shoulder, knee and head for the sake of realism.

Week 4: Big Dog Animation

 i)        If engineered or programmed badly, BigDog would fall over. Watch the full video again, and describe how BigDog’s legs move while walking– ie. what is the sequence of leg movements for one complete step? Use the terms BL, BR, FL, and FR for the back-left, back-right, front-left and front-right legs.

     The Big Dog starts by moving its FL foot and BR foot simultaneously at the direction it was being pushed. This was done to maintain balance and to prevent the whole body from tipping over. After one step, the opposite legs (FR and BL) will move and this sequence will repeat until it regained its balance. As it raised its leg, the body raised slightly and dropped when the leg touches the ground. Needless to say that body is tilted due to gravity pulling it down as it lost its balance.

ii)       Explain how this sequence of movements manages to balance BigDog’s body weight.

      The moving leg acts as a form of a support for the body as the angle and the impact upon the ground stops the body from tipping over immediately. Hence, the lack of balance reduces with each step, eventually coming to a halt when balance is retained.

iii)     Look at BigDog_kick_slow_motion.mov. Draw a storyboard of BigDog stabilising itself after being kicked.

You should draw the key poses. You don’t need to draw well – but you must show the leg positions and the body rotations around the X, Y and Z axes for each key pose.

Starting from the left, the first keypose is when the Big Dog is standing still. The second keypose is when the one frontal leg and the opposite back leg is raising. The body rotated  and raised slightly and, though mechanical, the legs move in the arc. The rest of the legs remain still. On the third keypose, the moving legs touches the ground and the body lowered slightly. The second and third keyposes repeat with the body rotation gradually reducing. Eventually, the final frame would be the first keypose to show that it has regained balance.

The following are a pair of videos displaying a Big Dog model animated to resemble the original video:

Making the animation is deceptively hard as I made a total of 7 retries. The difficulty mostly comes from showing the weight in the movement of Big Dog and to show the lack of balance. This was achieved through rotation and up-and-down movement of the body. I am ultimately proud of my work as I worked very hard for it.

Week 3: Rigging

The following are screenshots of poses taken from the finished rig model:

Pose 1

Pose 2

Pose 3

Reverse Foot Lock

Other Screenshots

Rigging was a lot tougher than I ever expected and not to mention extremely tedious. I now have a new-found respect for 3D modelers. I learn a lot from the exercise, such as how to create our own attributes and controls, along with binding the skeleton to the model. These would be very useful in making our own 3D models and rigging it for animation. Pretty much sums up the saying, "Hard work always pays off.".

I faced a lot of difficulty in the rigging despite how straightforward the tutorial was. The tutorial never mentioned that the solution for IK handlers needs to be set to rotation, so when I was doing Pole Vectors, an error occurred and it took me a while to be able to find a fix. Also, weight painting was especially hard and tedious, especially considering how consistent testing is the only way to find out if the model works as intended. Ultimately, my model is somewhat faulty but, as seen above, still capable of posing. Majority of the faults were on the arms and especially the legs (the leg had difficulty bending).

Rigging was really a new experience for me, even though I've rigged a model on IN3D previously. Regardless, that model was simple in comparison to this bipedal one. I know I will return to the tutorial should I ever need to rig a model again.

Week 1: Cow Body

The following are screenshots of the progress of the body of the cow model:

Doing the body model was much harder than expected but the tutorial helped me get through it. It also showed me several ways to make a bipedal character, cartoonic or realistic. One such way is to use nothing but a cube with a preplanned amount of subdivisions to roughly create the character's shape before going into detail. I also learned how to connect multiple models together, something which I had no knowledge of previously as I relied on grouping for the most part.

Week 1: More Spiderman Poses

Here are two extra poses I made for the Spiderman rigged model:

This first pose is not based on any picture or the sorts, rather it is simply how I'd imagine he would pose while getting ready to fight or while observing an enemy. This pose was obviously hard to do due to the lack of references but I am honestly rather proud of it. I tried to apply as much weight as I can for the thigh and I made heavy amounts of adjustments to his spine, feet and fingers. I screwed up with the neck though and I tried fixing it. Alas, I failed but this error is otherwise unnoticeable.

Now, this second pose isn't actually Spiderman's pose (rather, it is Wolverine of the X-men) but I actually wanted to try this rather cool pose. This pose is inspired by one of the X-men movie posters (forgot which movie). The claws were surprisingly difficult to model to make it seem like it is sharp and of the right length. The rest of the pose was rather simple and I made small changes to the spine, chest, knee, feet and hands. Not to mention the head and the arms, along with the elbow. Overall, I like this second pose and I am also proud of it.

Week 2: Character Poses

These are some poses I gave to a rigged model downloaded from the internet, based on several images found on Yahoo.

Making this pose is surprisingly difficult as the model itself is very thin, unlike the more muscular character in the image. The expression of the character was fairly difficult to do as I had no idea how the character's face controls were supposed to work but alas, I made a close resemblance. The arms, as simple as it looks, is actually the toughest part of this pose to make, along with the shoulders. As the character is feeling tense, the shoulder needs to be raised but not too much to avoid exaggeration. The arms need to be bent properly with the wrist not being too high or too low to display anger. Clenching or the fist was fairly simple in contrast. In addition, the spine was given a curve to make the character appear more alive. As the lower half of the character's body was not revealed, I made a little extra by making the model kneel.

Unlike the previous one, this one is far more feminine. The arms, face and body curve proved to be little trouble. Initially, the model's right hand wasn't able to reach the floor like the woman on the image. However, after tweaking the auto stretch feature on the wrist, I managed to get it touch the floor. In addition, I reduced the size of the smile to make the model more "cool" and calm rather than sad. Below is a screenshot of how it looked like before it touches the floor.

Other than that, the lower portion of the model was especially hard to create as we are only given one angle to model it from so the front and back view had to be made based purely on guessing or imagination. I made a lot of adjustments to the knees to display weight, which is also very difficult but I did my best.

Another feminine pose. This one was made rather quickly as I was beginning to get familiar with the rig controls. Still, I had difficulty, especially with the legs. I actually had fun creating the model's facial expression as I always liked the idea of a confident looking character with a cheeky smile. Though the image does not really show such a smile, it was pretty close and I personally think a cheeky smile looks better on the model. Other than that, I had little difficulty in this pose compared with the other two.

Week 2: Spiderman Pose

These are screenshots of Spiderman's rig in his unique pose. Posing was a lot harder than I ever expected and I know well enough what to expect in the future in posing a model.