Models
Ik Joe w/ setup machine rig
Ik Joe w/ my rig (sorry no fingers)
by Steve George (AKA Tunames)
Basicman zip
basicgal zip

So last week we tackled side steps, and that was enough. I guess I didn't take into account how much humanoids add to the challenge level, sorry. So we'll go a little slower.

Excercise A: Balance. Take you simple model of choice from a nuetral standing pose, have them raise 1 leg up, move to some other position, and set it back down. (Think ballet, or martial artist who likes to pose ) Use your arms if it helps you to balance (this is just to give people another chance to focus on Center of gravity balancing over the support leg, and hip tilt's (especially versus the chest)

Excercise B: Make your chosen model, jump big.


Again think of contrasting concave versus convex lines of the body. Also focus on anticipating and follow through. Our hero Keith Lango uses a jump as an example in his lines of force tutorial. (If you haven't figured it out yet, Keith Lango is an animation God, go read everything you can on his site!!)

-Alonso

No comments yet? everyone must be really busy working on this exercise trying to be the first one to post.......

Well, I am new so don't make fun of me . Ignore the left arm, had trouble with it (it jumped around during the tweening prosses)... Anyways here it is. B is good I think.

ABC5a Avi (138 DivX)
ABC5b Avi (112 DivX)

right click and click save as otherwise angelfire tells you it doesn't allow direct linking.

OK, here's my first try at the "standing on one leg" exercise.

One_leg_A1.mov (approx. 80 kb)

BTW, Heath, I tried to save your animation, but when I tried to play it, I got an error message about it being corrupt or that I had the wrong codec. I'm using Firefox and Windows Media Player 9. What codec did you use?

Cindy,

Wow - almost perfect You have done a great job animating the character.

The one main flaw is character balance. The balance you have at frame 25 is what you should achieve just as you lift his/her foot off the ground.

To get really picky, when the right knee turns out - it stops dead - no sign of any movement. You need a moving hold to keep the lower half of the character alive.

Cheers

Hi Heath,

Ideally you want to compress the aniamtion to something to the order of 200kb or less. Use QT, Sorenson 3, Low and render to 320x240 settings in AM. This way you will get more people viewing your work. It gets quite expensive for us slow modem users to download 1+mb files all the time.

Cheers

Wow great job Cindy! I don't feel qualified to comment..yet! but if I had one critique it would be the Right foot it's to steady like he's standing on something...

here's my FIRST pass just for timing and all got some serious popping with the arms but it's all the time I have right now will do a 2nd pass when I get back in town .........

ExerciseA 1st Pass

Steve,

Aside from the arm popping its a pretty good job.

Things to fix:
1. His left foot goes down before it goes up. Don't anticiapte the foot raise by putting the foot through the ground anticipate by shift the body balance and maybe turning the knee a little in preparation.

Things to look at (not necessarily fix):

1. Torso looks stiff. Did you use any rotation?
2. It looks liek the left leg is returned to the ground in a linear matter and there is a pop in the knee. Don't drift it back, place it back.

The rest is great - the balance - the little jiggle in the raised leg (Cindy - this is what you need in yours)

Cheers

Steve, did you happen to move the bicep bones at all? I found that when I did that, it made the arms pop some. I fixed it by removing any keyframes on the biceps and just move the hand targets and the shoulder bones.

Maybe you should look at the arms from the top view and check the angle of the elbows to see if they flip.

The legs look good. I'll work on adding some jitter to the legs on my animation.

Here's my attempt at Exercise 5A. Note that I have no real idea how a side kick is supposed to work/look so mine is simply and exercise in motion and balance!

Exercise 5A (45kb MOV)

Cheers

Getting jiggy with it!

Here is my first attempt with Exercise 5A.

Exercise 5A first pass


David: I like the movements you gave him. My only suggestion would be to "Hyper" extend the keyframe of the kick... to give it some punch and help convey a powerful action. Its just my personal preference, however it looks great the way it is!
Nice work!

Steve: When he lifts the left leg, I would expect his body to sink down due to the additional weight on his right leg. Something is making it look like strings are attached to his arms and pulling them up. Do you animate the arms IK? I personally animate arms using Forward Kinematics, this gives the animation natural arcs. But just my opinion. Keep up the good work! Looking good!

A couple of thoughts first:

Now the balance movement is one where we will naturally twin, but twinning is such a no no thing in animation that you will often get knee jerk critiques "your twinning" so be aware, there are times when we do twin in life, but twinning looks a little boring so make sure you need it, don't get stuck to long in it, and try to be creative about getting into it and out of it.

A common thing I'm seeing is that the Center Of Gravity (COG) isn't getting pushed over far enough. If you are balancing on 1 foot, that foot is your support. If you imagine a line straight up from the support you'll need equal weight on either side of the line. So if the body is simmetrical, but the leg comes out of the side (look at a skeleton), then with only 1 foot down the pelvis will have to be symmetrical over that foot. In other words the leg will not be straight up and down, but fairly angled.

Heath:
I'm having problems downloading yours, I'm having to let it open in a browser window (after copying the link and pasting into the address bar) and then save the page.
A:Pretty good. The recovery is nice and the arms going up for balance is good. The Center of Gravity isn't quite over far enough, right now most of your weight is on the screen left side of the imaginary line. The body looks a little like you set 2 key frames and then set a new frame inbetween them, it would spice it up more to vary the tilt of the ribs and pelvis. The arms start twinning when he starts falling and landing. After landing the right foot slides back along the ground, pin it down. Great start so far.
B:Really solid start!! The main complaints are that it's a little floaty (like he's underwater) and it's pure twins. Timing in animation is like any other art, it has to be varied to be intersting, some fast parts some slow parts. Give him a little more time in the squished up antic, explode him into the leap, slow the leap down at the top(actually just leave it at it's current speed), speed it back up as it comes down (just like a bouncing ball) Hit the impact quick (try like 4 frames long) Leave him recovering a little longer before he moves. Mix it up with the arms and legs, 1 goes before the other, 1 goes at a somewhat different angle than the other, etc. Great start!

Cindy:
Looking really nice. Good use of hips and nice moving of the arms. His cog needs to be over the support before he can left the other leg, otherwise he will fall (right now his leg moves before his weight is ready). You did a very nice job of avoiding twinning while balancing the arms (except at the end where the straighten and then drop). The hips and torso are working very nicely together in the beginning but the hips stop moving while the torso keeps going and it looks less convincing. Could use more successive breaking of the joints in the arms, especially at the wrists. (Successive breaking of the joints is instead of unfolding all the joints at once which looks a little floaty, you unroll the joints, ie. start with the shoulder coming down all the way, then the elbow opens, then the wrist unfolds, then the fingers splay out.) When he puts his leg down I realize that his COG hasn't been over his support leg. This is a great start!

Steve:
Good movement of the ribs vs pelvis. And great work with the head. You can bend the elbows down a little more sometimes and they won't look quite so twinned (which they aren't really). Gotta get your CoG more over the line. The foot is slipping through the ground before it comes up because of spline interpolation in your chanels, change it to linear and it will go away.(make sense?)

David:
Excellent!! Well done. Great job making the whole body explosive at the kick. It even looks like maybe you put some shoulder animation in there, sign of a real animator. Only suggestion I would make is break the wrists some, right now the wrists stay constantly straight along the forearm, use them to add more follow through. (you can do the same with the fingers versus hands also if you want to go that far). Special assignment for you: animate an attack. put 2 guys in a scene and have 1 land a punch or kick on the other (don't go to overboard on this, keep it a short excercise) (it might help to look at this page and the next from the Dojo Project tutorials, and you might also read Keith Lango's tutorial on adding snap to animation)

Looking good so far everyone

-Alonso

Jospeh:
Very nice. Great job with the hips vs ribs and the head, really looks like he's trying to keep his balance by rotating his core around (which is how we really do it). Good job being brave and tilting the torso so much to the side. The only real advice I can give you is that you'll need to shift the COG more over the support foot when things are more vertical (when he's more horizontal with ribs tilted and leg out the COG is fine where its at) so you'll have to shift back and forth. Can't comment on the arms yet 'cuz they look still pretty ruff, but I do notice that you are keeping the wrists stiff like David, don't forget to bend them to add follow through. Lookin good

-Alonso

First time for everything. First post. First animation. I've had AM for 4+ years and this is the first time I've actually done something more than fiddle with it and then walk away.

I had a hard time with the arms on BasicMan3. As I moved the target Nulls the elbows jumped all over the place, hence the odd arm jitter at the beginning. Hopefully over time my animating will get better.

Excercise 5A

OK here's pass #2

ExerciseA Pass 2

Edit: shoulda checked for comments before I posted thanks guys now on to pass 3

Greg!
Welcome! You shouldn't have waited so long, impressive first animation. I love that little recuperation jump. One little thing i think you could add is finishing with a different pose at the ending, more asymetrical.

David!
Wow! A lot to learn scrolling that one. I like the feeling of weight in the landing.


Michel

Greg: Very nice, I do love the small jump near the end. I agree with Michel. Overall he is looking very promising! My personal preference would be to see this pose from a slightly different angle (to see the leg going back) but it looks great from the front as well. Maybe move the wrists more. Keep up the good work! lookin good!

Steve: Movement looks good. I would think that as he lifts his leg, the body weight should cause him to sink down a bit on one leg. Other than that, I cannot comment too much, it looks very good! Keep it up!

Greg:
Welcome! Very nice first entry. Nice subtle anticipation for the weight shift to get the foot off the ground (need to put the more over the support foot though). Good balance. Consider tilting and moving the ribs and pelvis more independently of each other. Your arms are twinning, and everything is landing at the same time at the end. Great start!

Steve:
Such subtle changes it's hard to see, but it does look like the COG is a little better balanced.


IK vs FK arms.
I have the impression that people are using IK arms for this. When I was starting out I leaned towards IK arms, but now that I know a little more I'm trying to get back into using FK. The advantage of FK is that the computer will more easily put in in betweens in arcs, and that the arms movement will start higher up the heirarchy at the torso (you know that rule? animate down the heirarchy ) Of course the advantage of IK is the arms go exactly where you want them, and I find it a little bit easier to pose them. But with IK the computer will always make straight lines so you'll have to go in and push for arcs, and you must always pay attention to making the arms match the body movement appropriately, and some times you can get chattering/popping arms with IK. So my approach now is: if I need the hand to stay put somewhere, or its reaching somewhere specific I'll use IK, but if the arm is free to move in space then I'll use FK. But that's just my approach.

Hey David, the special assignment was just in case you were getting bored with the basic ABC excercises. No pressure to do it if your not interested How're you liking the apprentice program? How long will you be in it? Do you have a project of your own you'll start when you finish?

-Alonso

Here's my first pass. Just pose to pose, no real cleanup yet. I also want to play with the camera angle; straight ahead does nothing for the silhouette in some poses. But it loops well!

Patrick!
You are improving very fast. Those are 3 very daring, extreme, well balanced and pleasing poses. Nice work! Hourra! long life to the boot camp!

Michel

Hey Patrick, nice poses!

Ok, here's my second try at the one-legged stand. I added some motion to the legs, and tried to get the COG over the standing leg earlier.

One_leg_A2.mov

BTW, I'm using the basicman3 model, and I noticed that the left middle and ring fingers didn't bend correctly, at least in the one I downloaded. I fixed it by reassigning some of the CPs.

I've attached it here (266 kb, not compressed - I can't get WinZip to work in a non-administrator account, and I don't like to go on the Net as administrator )

EDIT: The fixed basicman model seems to be a 0-byte file. I'll try to post it again later.

Second post! Here's the jump. Thanks for all the comments and suggestions. Now that I've come out in the open, I'll have to keep going.

Second Part

Patrick,

Very nice work - nice poses, balance and motion. The only complaint I have is that on reaching each pose the model goes stiff (with the small exeption in pose 2 when the back leg moves and pose 3 with the head movement). I doubt even a prima ballarina will go that stiff - a moving hold - even slight - will give the animation a sense of life during those poses.

To be really picky, the final placement of the leg/foot back on the ground is a little linear. Did you set the curve on your final keys to zero slope?

By the way - can you enlighten us to your rendering setup. It looks very nice. Is that toon rendered? What are your settings (I'm trying to do some but not having a great deal of success)


Cindy,

Much better and excellent right up until the end. Try setting your final keys to zero slope to avoid linear motion. Her right arm over extends and pop/locks just before your swing it to her side (linear) and her left arm does the same 2/3rds the way down and you lock the arms off in a twinned pose that looks unnatural.

Her right wrist is moved into position just before the halfway mark and doesn't move again after that.

The final body position needs to recover its balance when the foot is returned to the ground. The upper body (based on the hip position, hasn't translated since keyed just after halfway through your animation)

By the way the basicman3fixed model downloads as a 0 byte file!


Gregory,

Good attempt. Issues:

1. Watch your key placement. You have lots of keys placed seemingly one after the other with large movement. Examples - frame 1 and 2 witht eh movmeent of the arms. This gives the impression of popping.
2. Good anticipation and motion but it would be nice to see the models spine curve in conjunction with the hips and neck/head.
3. During the jump his body goes upright very quick yet his motion throught the air carries on a fair way. Draw an arc through his centre of gravity (think cannon ball arm when fired from a cannon). Pose the model CG on that arc - THEN - start posing the model around it.
4. Leg motion during the jump pops. Also - most people will stretch their legs out during the jump (ie like a walk stride) and not return to the ground with a bent knee - particularly one bent at about 60 degrees.
5. Although hard to tell with the angle, your follow through feels a little too upright. I would have had the body upright or slightly forward on impact, the bring the body foward and down during the squash. Your body does not move at all during this phase. Note that the head will also follow through AFTER the body. Your haven't animated any head movement here.
6. You have some serious arm twisting and popping. If you can't get the motion you want from using the IK nulls then go back the the 0 keyframe and return to FK.
7 Try to space out the waves to the crowd at the end. He's moving into the action way to fast. Remember ANTICIPATION so the audience can see what is going on. Anticipation does not just apply to the initial motion at frame 0.

Cheers

DJ - Oops, sorry about the model file! I just attached it to the post. I'll see if I can get the file fixed and repost it. And I'll work on the arms some more.

Deletec until I can get this fixed... grrrr!

I'll try this again... Here's another attempt at the one-legged stand.

One_leg_A3.mov

I think the Basicman model can be downloaded now. I had to upload it to my FTP site, because it seems any file I attach using the forum is 0 bytes. Grrrr!

Basicman with fixed left hand (78 kb)

My second attempt at exercise 5A...

Exercise 5A - #2

Cindy,

She still looks a bit like a robot winding down at the end. You need to maintain that fluid motion you have throughout your animation right to the end. You might like to delete those last few keys and try again rather than just adjusting them.


Joseph,

Wow - Wow - Excellent work there. To be really picky, the ending looks a bit 'spongy'

Cheers

Here's my attempt at first ex. I've used a kick for this, if I get the time I'll also do balance on one foot, very busy this week though.

Nice Kick, very fast, but at the end his foot lands in front of his left foot. It seems to me when you do a kick the foot generaly lands where it picked up from, I am no expert though.

Here's my fourth try at the standing on one leg exercise. I tried to get the arms to not look so robotic. It's difficult when using IK on the arms, IMO.

One_leg_A4.mov

And here's the first try at the jump. This is a first pass, and I concentrated on the legs, the hip arc, and getting the torso and hips over the COG from the front view. Next, I'll work on the forward bend of the torso.

I'm pretty satisfied with the leg movements and timing, but would welcome any suggestions.

Jump_B1.mov

Cindy:

I like the balance on one leg and don't think it looks robotic.

The flight looks right in the jump but I have a couple of suggestions regarding the legs which may help.

He takes off before the legs are fully extended, it may look better if you keep him on the ground for another frame or two.

When he lands the legs seem to be behind his COG. I think they should be in front to stop the forward momentum after he lands.

Hope this helps.

Cheers

Mike

Patrick,

WOW - absolutely fabulous. The Camera changes work very well although just a tad fast for my taste toward the end - but thats simply a personal thing.

Well Done. Thats a keeper and would look great on AM films as well.

Alonso - have you thought about keeping a few of these exercise results as samples?

Others, If you haven't done so already - download and view Patricks exercise movie.

Patrick can you make the .act or .cho available for others to study?

Cheers

Hi!
Here is my "first rough pass" at the "Big Jump"

Exercise 5B - first pass

Here's my effort at Exercise 5B - Jump.

Exercise 5B Jump (52kb MOV)

I found doing the jump far more difficult than doing the side kick!

Cheers

Hi Joseph,

Now thats a big jump

Issues:
1. Considering the size of the leap the anticipation is little short
2. The recovery from stretch is too quick and does not have good stretch
3. At the top of the arc he is already leaning back. At the top of the arc he should be starting to recover from full stretch which will typicaly cause the upper body to bend forward in an effort to bring the feet forward (Just watch the action of a long jumper)
4. The second half of the jump peak looks like he is preparing for a 'bomb' into a pool.
5. He stretchs out only one leg.
6. The foot he lands on slides backward (if anything it should slide forward)
7. He over balances. Now this would have been good - considering the one foot landing - for a step forward recovery.
8. The recovery pose is 'twinned'

Other than these issues the motion is smooth and he looks alive.

Cheers

Hey guys,
I wrote crits, for everyone but my home internet connection wouldn't work. (And of course I couldn't email it to my work account) and my work internet doesn't have a quicktime player. Sorry, I'll get crits up as soon as I can.

-Alonso

Here's the one-legged poses animation from the front angle only. My camera-change version still kinda bugs me.
I hope to be able to do the jump exercise as well if time allows.

Here is my attempt at the big jump.

It shows 3 views of the same action.Big Jump 5b

Thanks for the comments David.
I tweaked it more, and slowed the complete action down. It still does not look right to me. What do you think?



Exercise 5B - second attempt

Thanks,

Patrick - Nice job! Good "moving holds". I liked the version with the camera moves too.

Ken - Also good. The only thing I noticed was that his body seemed too far back when his feet hit the ground. I don't know if that's how it's supposed to be or not, but to me, it looked like he might fall on his butt

Jfirestine - Big jump! The only thing I saw was that he lands on his right heel and then his body rocks forward, which makes him seem unbalanced. Otherwise, I didn't notice anything. The takeoff and middle phase look good to me.

Now, my turn. Here's my second try on the big jump, with arm, torso, and head motion added.

Jump_B2.mov

Joseph,

It reads better but there are still some issues.

1. Anticipation is good but look at a swimmer on the blocks - arms swing back behind them becasue they want to jumpt so far.
2. Liftoff was good but your not doing much with his arms - no follow through - its as if he was launched into the air.
3. Recovery should be through the line of motion and not a big arc around it. This is giving your character a sense of overbalance and impossible recovery - if you want to maintain this overbalance then he really needs to take at least a step foward (think olympic gymnast going over the vault and NOT nailing the landing)

Cindy,

Good attempt - Issues:

1. Anticipation it too upright. Bend the body forward at least a little
2. You are doing a hop but you raised the right leg off the ground too soon - you try raising yourself from the squat position with only one leg on the ground!
3. Liftoff should have the bodyweight forward at full extent - don't forget to get nice pose curves in the figure. I don't know why people are keeping the actors arms tucked into the body during the jump. It's really hard to jump that way.
4. You've also landed the character with bent legs and the body overbalanceing forward.
5. Remember that the body will always remain in motion and different parts of the body will recover at different rates. You have locked her into a bent knee sqaut then had the upper body recover then unlock the knees to a final recovery position - keep it all flowing then offset your keys.
6. Unlock her wrists. You have the arms moving and fingers moving but her wrists are locked.


Ken,

Not bad. Some small issues:

1. Try to achieve nice poses - at full extent on the jump go for a nice curve from fingers throguh wrist, arms, back, legs etc.
2. The motion is twinned - try to offset the movement somewhat.
3. The landing has his legs too far forward. If it were for real he would have landed on his backside and not been able to recover. Watch the path of his hips and his CG (navel) and place the feet along as an extention of that path.
4. All the recovery/follow through is doen in his arms and legs - he has a body and a head - these have to followthrough as well.
5. The motion is fluid but the timing is off. ie it feels evenly paced. It should be quick to take off and quick to land with a paced recovery

Cindy,
I really like your motion and the staggered timing on the legs. I would probably make the anticipation crouch and the recovery from the landing a little faster, but other than that, it looks great!

Thanks for the input!
Here is another attempt...
Exercise 5B - 3rd. attempt

Looking for input. Thanks again for everyone's help.