Begin animating!
I am starting my first animation!
I’m going to film my character tumbling and jumping in action. I wanted to make this animation because my character should have a cool aerial tumble. Then I remembered parkour and the tumbling action of the Avengers’ Black Widow character.
This is the reference I discovered:
I am going to take one of the movements and make it. The movement I want to make is a combination of [run] [jump] [crouch] [roll] and other movements.
References：
After importing the reference material in Maya, I started to plan the keyframes I needed to create. From my previous experience of animating, I knew that I could not animate the movement of the character’s foot controller (the controller that controls the displacement of the whole body). So I needed to animate the movement of the character model’s foot controller and waist controller for the character itself.
I plan to start by creating 0,3,8,12,18,21,24,28,31,34,38,42,47,51,56,62,76 keyframes.
However, at this point, the keyframe animation looked very strange and the model appeared to stall when it flipped in the air. After checking, I found that I hadn’t added intermediate frames, which caused my model to move horizontally in a straight line. During a tutorial with Alan, he told me that the model’s jumping, crouching and rolling movements felt underpowered. The movement of the characters felt light and airy. After some discussion, I continued to polish my animation. I increased the height curve of my character’s jumps and more carefully adjusted the rhythm of my character’s animations. The character movement rate was too even and did not have a compressed burst of power when jumping. So! Work began on the animation curve too!
This time I focused more on the rhythm and power of my character’s movements and added a lot of keyframes.
The final animation curve panel:
Animation layout:
Animation layout after importing the scene:
Summary:
The jump + flip character animation was extremely difficult to create. Almost the entire character must be reversed. The character in the animation I just finished didn’t feel powerful when crouching or jumping up, which was a major issue. It was extremely difficult for me to modify. The character’s model would pass through if I crouched a little deeper. After observing my character, I discovered that her legs were too long, causing the animation to falter when she crouched due to the folding of the legs. My first concern when designing the character was the model’s aesthetics (yes, I had a lot of fun creating the character’s long legs when I first modeled it because I liked the design). So the entire animation process taught me a lot, such as how model creation and binding affect character animation. I will be more meticulous when creating character models in the future. Fortunately, I discovered a solution in which I could rotate the character model’s crotch down through the crotch controller and move the total controller for the waist backward before moving it down. This gives it a more natural appearance.