Animating

Pose to Pose Animation

Pose to pose animation is a technique used within Character Animation to rapidly transit between complex poses using natural motion, limiting the need to manually manipulate each individual limb of a character to create a new pose by key-framing.  Subsequently numerous poses were created to simulate body shapes and movements typical of Figure Skating, these poses were determined via watching the earlier researched video of which screenshots were then taken.

 

To start with the default stance of the Ice Skater Character in T-Pose was set at Keyframe –10, then for each Keyframe leading up to 0 different Poses were created ensuring that “Auto Key” was enabled to record each bone position.

 

Pose recreated from Research Video

 

 

 

Created Figure Skating Poses

(Click each thumbnail for Full-Size)

 

Animating the Character

Before proceeding with the animation process, essential principles of Character Animation were considered to enhance the potential quality of the final animation. Firstly all human movements occur in a natural arching motion rather than in a straight line i.e. from A to B. Additionally when a person raises their arm it will go slightly higher than intended then move back into position for example. This is known as “Drag” and significantly helps to add realistic flowing motion to an animation. The previously created pose frames were copied and distributed along the animation timeline within 3DS Max. Between these poses arching movements and Drag effects were implemented where possible to improve the realism of the Skating animation whilst Auto Key was enabled.

 

Animating Ice Skater Spin

(Click Here for Full-Size)

 

Issues…..

Conducting the animation stage was exceptionally troublesome as 3DS Max became unresponsive due to an unknown reason. This made the animation process virtually impossible to implement as the character motion could not be smoothly previewed by scrubbing along the timeline. Consequently the character’s movements were approximated as I was animating almost blindly. Due to this the final animation dramatically suffered and I’m extremely disappointed based on all the hard work dedicated towards modelling the mesh, fixing the envelopes and creating strong  poses. Additionally pose to pose animating didn’t work correctly,  therefore smooth transitions between poses were not achieved resulting in sudden changes and jerky movements. In some cases alterations were made to the character’s position for example, but were not recorded once the file was saved and re-opened, this wasted vital time as poses had to be remade or even scrapped.

 

Final Character Animation