Big Hero 6 Animation Study

I've been having a lot of trouble with my current assignment. The weight hasn't felt as great as I want it to, and the character doesn't seem to feel alive. So I decided to do a weight study this week. I downloaded some new rigs and really wanted to try it out, so here it is!

So here's the study and what I've learned from it!

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. It's not perfect at all, I don't think I'll fix it just because it was supposed to be an in-the-moment study. It still feels a little floaty, the landing after hitting the wall doesn't feel quite right and something about the kick still doesn't feel right, and I should have made the arc nicer on the last step of the run and I should have fixed that floaty animation in the end. But enough with the bad, let's go over what I learned!

Here's the reference I followed. In case you don't already know, it's from Disney's Big Hero 6. I chose this one because it's a full body shot and it was easy to follow because the camera move is so general.

So let's examine my animation from the beginning forward. I won't go over the running sequence in the beginning because it's so short and basic, so I'll start right when he jumps into the wall. The text will be above the picture that I'm going over, just to clear that up now.

He comes down from the apex of his last step and crouches pretty low and leans forward into an off-balance pose. The weight at this point is pulling him forward and he's preparing to slam into the wall, so he brings his arms forward.
His screen left arm is the first to contact, you'll notice his foot isn't rolling like it should be... I actually just noticed that. But it happens pretty quick so it's not too big of a deal. I could have pushed this pose further, he's kind of just a straight line as far as his line of action goes, but it's kind of an in-between pose of two extremes.

Here he's completely contacting the wall, it happens I think two or three frames after the last picture. He does cushion himself with his screen left arm so that he doesn't hurt himself so it's not a SMACK kind of hit. His screen right foot/leg bounces off of the wall, that was really fun to animate, as well as his screen right arm sort of slapping the wall.

After the slam against the wall, he lands in a semi-crouched position. He really absorbs the weight into his feet. And he holds that absorption for his step back and just into the jump.

Here he is at the top of his jump, this part took the longest. I played around with him jumping straight up and a little bit back, but it kept looking horrible. So I made him jump toward the wall, very slightly, and brought his arms all the way up, following my reference.

As he kicks, his arms come to his side and he falls onto his screen right foot again. It took a little while adjusting my curves to get him to look like he gets pushed by his leg. But the reference was there, so it didn't take too long.

Here are the last three, the hops. His arms were really fun to animate in that circular motion. The foot placements took forever, but I realized they're KEY to making this animation look lifelike. Without realistic foot movements, the animation would have no life at all.

So, I learned with this assignment that it's really helpful to have clean curves, delete all of those extra keys that play no role. Move out the tangents to match what the keys were doing. It really helps the smoothness overall. Watch Victor Navone's Spline Tutorial for more information on clean splines.
Another thing I learned is that foot movement is an absolute necessity to realistic animation. People are constantly moving their feet around. They're always shuffling, just check it out next time you're in a public place.

I hope I could share any helpful tips, next test I do I'm going to record my screen and make a time-lapse or realtime video to upload here.

Here's an extra video I did of a new rig Animation Mentor released called Sarge!

Workflow

Jon's Workflow
*I took these notes during class, so it's kind of a mess!

Visualization. When getting a dialogue shot, put it on repeat and listen to it over and over again for about an hour or so. Try to find different shot ideas in your head. If you come across something you like, take a pause and draw thumbnails. Keep them fast and efficient, get the essence of the pose and idea. You want to keep momentum going, so keep it brief. These thumbnails will allow you to pitch the idea to somebody. Now clear that all out of your brain and start again. Do this at least three times with completely different ideas, don't keep them too similar. Don't get married to an idea. Sometimes people could have feedback that could add to the idea. If you're too closed off on one of your ideas, you could be limited in how accepting you are to ideas. Believe in yourself through ideas, don't feel like you're doing what somebody else wants to please them or because you're not confident in your own idea. Only add them if you want to, you're the one doing the shot.

Reference. Using two cameras can be useful. Recording a few takes from multiple angles gives you a lot of variety to sift through. Don't skip on this phase, it's very important. Hit ideas and poses, but continue other variations. Try not to redo the same thing every take, try more. Get out of your comfort zone. If your reference looks robot-y, your animation will too. Get loose, study acting, and practice! You'll get better over time.

Blocking. Use stepped if you can, get the key ideas in. Now you can play around with how you move through poses. Showing really rough things is okay at certain studios. It works best to get core ideas into stepped. Don't over-breakdown the shot in stepped, it's easier to get the finished result in spline where everything is smooth. Instead of taking a lot of time figuring out in reference, put rough poses in the blocking to pitch with. You can easily see what's going on in the viewport than what you're doing in person. If you overcomplicate, though, it could lead to deleting frames in the future, which results in a waste of time when you added those frames. Keep it simple.

Spline. Ignore the arms. Focus on the hips/root in relation to the footfalls. Look at the pacing on ones. Think about repetition in shots, break up evenness, and involve variation. Watch root from start to finish, if it's 90% right, the rest of the animation will be easier. Now look into offsetting keys, overlapping actions, and follow-through.

Polish. Make sure the root works and look into all of the details. Arc track your points. Brows and eyes are done before the rest of the face because it's much easier to handle. Work through the facial animation in spline, stepped will look bad and will be harder overall to figure it all out.

Study

So, I've been watching lots of YouTube videos and tutorials and stuff on animation. I've come across an excellent talk by Hjalti Hjalmarsson, a wonderful animator, rigger, and more who works on Blender open projects.

It's super informative and made me rethink posing for camera or natural posing from all angles. Especially how resizing legs, like in the video, can really benefit you. But it could make the rig look off or weird in general.  Also, Hjalti must be an incredibly patient man... How on earth can you work with constraints like that?! I definitely need to do more studying with constraints.

It's pretty awesome how Hjalti shoots reference. Using lots of people doing the same task to find general ideas as well as personality. And something to remember always remember the fulcrum point. Center of mass can help animation look more natural instead of the floaty, newbie look. I really need to remember this. I love how he shoots detailed reference. I have an iPhone for a reason! :)

Another key thing that caught my attention is anticipation. Without anticipation, animation could just move from one place to another. There's no life at all in that, and it looks really, really bad. 

Talking about life... make things human. It could be little accidents that happen during reference that catch attention, maybe something you see from a random dude outside. I love how Hjalti points out he liked how the voice actor almost thought that cigarette was already lit before he grabbed his matches, then checked his time. That really stuck out to me, character is everything. I mean, this is character animation after all! :)

His point nearing the end was great, even in Disney's Tangled there is a small error that nobody noticed, but it functioned. The shot wasn't completely perfect frame by frame, but it looked okay in camera. However I'm not going to fall into, "Well, hey, Disney doesn't make everything perfect!" :)

Something I'm going to try to do is study some animation, I downloaded some trailers from YouTube, and I want to start looking into how the animator behind that scene got it to look so lifelike.