Team Storyboard

As a  team, we created a storyboard of our animations and put them together, we created two versions of this (below being the updated one) showing how our animations flowed together. All three animation sets begin with an Idle pose, these being stealth, strong/heroic and wounded. My animation set is the top four panels. These being idle, idle to jump to ledge, shimmy and climb onto ledge. The storyboard helps to block out the final animation and helps me to see roughly what level the team members are at.  

Graph Editor

 To get to grips with the graph editor again after a long break, I followed a presentation given online by my lecturer. This presentation showed the varies aspects of the graph editor through the tutorial. The graph editor is split into several lines which contrast with the animation made in the view plane. The axis are displayed with different colours, these being Green for the Y axis, Red for the X axis and Blue for the Z axis. This can be manipulated by moving the dots on the graph which match with the keyframes on the animation.
  The tutorial showed me how to create a bouncing ball and and manipulate the key frames on the graph to create a more realistic motion. Another I could take into account if I were to recreate this is the principal of squash and stretch to make a more visually realistic version. I used the technique of onion skinning so I could always see what was happening from the side view plane. This helped me with the anticipation of the bounce and allowed me to correct the animation accordingly.

(above - Side view of the ball with skinning on)

(above - The graph editor after being manipulated)

Animation 2 - The Jump

The second animation in my sequence is jumping onto a ledge. My reference came from a video of myself doing this and from watching game play from Uncharted. I tried to follow the several principals of animation with staging to show the emotion of the character through the strong pose and the facial expression. I also delved into the anticipation of the jump. I made sure the character took a significant step backwards to get a short run up to push himself upwards into the air. I tried to create the basic keys I would need for the animation. These being the beginning pose (from idle), the anticipation (the step back) and the actual grabbing of the ledge. From this I can iron out the wrinkles and finish off the sections missing.

 (above - Idle pose)

(above - The step backwards)

(above - Catching the ledge)

With my animations in my mind, I researched the principals of animation and tried my best to follow them as best as possible. This I believe would really benefit the realism and the depth I go into with my work. Here is the reference material I used: http://minyos.its.rmit.edu.au/aim/a_notes/anim_principles.html 

Reference Gathering

I collected several means of reference to follow throughout my animation process. These come in the forms of images ad videos. My team recorded each other acting out the animations and took photos of each other stood I their strong idle poses.

Here is an image of me in the idle pose I used for my idle animation

Below are the videos I recorded of me acting out the animation. From this I can study the smallest movements and take note of the timing involved.

http://youtu.be/bwcm5grHYCA

I plan take reference of each animation as I go along and to redo these at a later date. This way I can keep on top of my working pipeline.

I also looked into references in games, with Uncharted being a big inspiration for our final showreel, I made sure to look more into that game and study the animations from various angles.

(Nathan Drake, Uncharted, Climbing)

Idle pose 2

Because our team ended up doing very similar idle poses, I decided to vary mine into more of a stealth position, this being low down and ready for action. I needed a very strong pose that really showed the emotion in the character without it being explained. I went for the head looking around a lot, quite quick movements and a very fluent motion following the breathing. Left is the pose I placed the character in. As before I made sure the character was facing in the same axis so the final animation with the whole team would be easy to do.

Idle Pose Take 1

I started off by creating my first idle pose for my character. My first pass at this was to create a very simple idle pose to practise getting the breathing and the timing correct. To start this, I created a very simple strong pose to follow through with. I focused on getting the shoulders moving correctly with the breathing in and out and really tried to emphasise the chest going in and out with each breath. Another thing I tried to incorporate was facial expressions. To do this, I created a relaxed expression, animated the mouth the open slightly with each breath and the cheeks to slightly contract on the breath out. I also added in a blink towards the end of the animation where the eyebrows follow as they would follow the facial muscles ion real life.

I was also careful to make sure my character was facing in the Z direction. This is to make the job easier when adding in my teams animations, with all characters facing in the same direction.

Animation Diagram

A a team we created a simple diagram explaining how we wanted our animations to flow together. We thought as our original idea to create our four separate animations and flow them together as one character. Below is the order we wanted our animations to follow.

To make our animation easier, we later decided that flowing twelve animations created by three people wouldn't be a great idea for our animation pipeline. We decided that the second and third person creating the animations would have to wait for the person to finish their final animation to have access to their final pose to work from. We decided the most feasible way would be to use a similar structure, but to have each persons animations as three different characters in the same scene.

Brief

As a team we have to create a three part animation with research. From this, I have decided that as a team we shall attempt a scene built up of twelve different animations which will be blended together seamlessly. Our idea is based on the game Uncharted which features different "parkour" style animations. The different moves our character will follow are climbing up ledges, vaulting over walls and sliding across zip-lines. This is very much Uncharted influenced and games such as this and Tomb Raider will prove as excellent reference material throughout.