Animation Settings
The animations for my character will be running at 8fps which is often the frames per second for some stop motion animations. Though the main reason for the low frame rate instead of a higher frame rate that so it will be easier to create the poses of the character since I have decided on a pose-by-pose (not to be confused with pose-to-pose) animation which allows me to have more control over what my characters movements.
Since the animations I’m doing are closer to stop motion I’m doing straight forward animation which is where I animate one pose at a time from the first frame to the last.
First Animation Timeline
For my first animation my character will start at a normal stance and then go into a fighting stance, the character will remain in this stance for a few seconds until they start punching at their opponent in front of them, once their done they’re going to start hopping back and forth. After these movements he will produce a tornado kick.
Making the Animation
During the first part of the animation until the end of the combat stance, keyframing the poses had been going well, but I did notice that the wrist controls didn’t seem to be working. After messing around in the software for a while I noticed that if edited the rotation of the wrist joints itself, it allowed me to move the wrists with the controllers again, but this would reset after each keyframe.
Next up was the punches. With these punches I needed to twist the chest’s x axis so that the animation looks natural and the punches can reach further, I learned this by acting out the animation myself and examining how each part of my own body moves. These punches were also affected by Ease In/ Ease Out to make them more impactful though the final animation showed that the second punch wasn’t as quick as the first.
I had also used this video for to reference the timing and movements of the arm while punching.
It came to the hopping part of the animation to notice that the weight painting of the character’s legs weren’t done very well since the thigh would stretch unnaturally. I would later fix this for the second animation but since I already started animating the first, I worried that I couldn’t fix it without losing some of the progress I already made.
After the hopping part I noticed that the knee controls of the character’s rig had broken and the knee joints would no longer point to the controller, this meant that I wasn’t able to do the tornado kick that I had planned. My counter to this was for the character to back up instead and then run into a flying kick.
I had gotten the run up animated but due to the poor weight painting on said legs going through with the flying leg kick would stretch it too much and just make the animation look horrible.
Therefore the only compromise I had was to change the kick into a third punch.