Start making the second animation.
The second animation I want to make is a cool kick animation. Yes, it’s a continuous kick. I once made an animation that only kicked once. It’s really hard. At that time, the keyframe of my kick was not made accurately, and there was a problem with the IK controller of the model leg, so I basically animated every frame of all controllers at that time. So this time, I challenge kick animation again.
This is the reference video I found:
References：
The moves I want to make [kick], [spinning jump kick] and [stored kick]. These three kicks would look great together. The Taekwondo video footage I found was perfect for the animation style I wanted to create. The kick animation also needs to focus on the rhythm of the movements, as the rhythm when storing the force needs to be slightly slower so that there is a slight pause in the force. On the other hand, the kicks need to be a bit more rhythmic, so that the legs kick out quickly, which gives the movement a more powerful feel.
As with the previous parkour animation, it was impossible to animate the controller’s movement under the character’s feet (the controller that controls full-body movement). So I needed to animate the movement of the character model’s foot controllers and waist controllers for the character itself.
Once I had imported the reference material into Maya, I started to plan the keyframes that I needed to create. I planned to create keyframes 1, 8, 9, 12, 17, 22, 25, 29, 34, 37, 41,48, 50, 54, 65 first.
The keyframe animation is not natural at this point. This is because the keyframes have not been added and the animation curve has not been adjusted. As long as I don’t add keyframes and adjust the animation curve, the character animation is missing a lot of power. So I will continue to polish my character’s animated kicking motion.
This time I added more keyframes than the last parkour animation because the jumping kick was a bit of a pain. Sometimes the leg seems out of the controller’s control and there’s always a jitter. So I had to check it frame by frame and then make changes. The most annoying thing was that when I finished all the animations and used the animation curve panel to adjust the rhythm of the movements, some of the controllers would have problems like the body would twist unnaturally a bit, the leg would shake and so on. So I modified it again for ages and ages.
The final animation curve panel:
Animation layout:
Animation layout after importing the scene:
Summary:
Kick animation is actually very challenging. Because I need to rotate the character model and adjust the controller. I also need to adjust the position of keys on the timeline on the animation curve panel. Sometimes there will be strange animation errors, so I have to modify them over and over again.
As a little additional knowledge, the kicks of the characters in my reference video are basically the same height the first two times, but in the process of making animation, I found that the animation of kicking at the same height twice is very strange. Just like the character’s leg is controlled by the line and can only kick this height. So I decided to increase the first kick’s height and the second kick’s speed. In this way, the character animation of kicking looks more vivid and interesting.