- Getting Comfortable with the Tail- Day One
When I started out, I had a bit of trouble getting used to the tail. This was because I was thinking of it as I would a walk cycle; pose-1, pose-2, pose-3, trying to key each shape the tail should make at specific points.
I actually spent a couple hours unsatisfied with my work until I reconsidered my method. It became a lot easier after I began thinking of the tail as a series of arrows, where each arrow points the direction that the one before it did last, with the movement originating from the base. I also reviewed my notes from the lecture and found it useful to remind myself that the tail must “point toward where it came from”.
In this sense there is no specific pose the tail must be in: the most realistic way to use it is to think about the way gravity would affect the base and animate the rest of the tail in turn. I would change the position of the base, then go down the chain and move each segment of the tail a couple frames after one another.
Knowing this, I was able to think of other ways to use the tail, i.e. for balance and emotion.
I also chose to add some sinking-log animation, not only for weight but for secondary action, in order to make the scene a bit more interesting and believable. I also found it fun to have the beaver balance a little bit with his tail as the logs bobbed up and down in response to his weight. I chose the beaver rig after deciding to incorporate the sinking logs, because I felt that tons of fallen trees were a bit too sad if you don’t have the hope that maybe a beaver did it to build himself a home.
After my first couple bounces, it was time to find out whether my motion trail was smooth, and whether it shows overlap of each tail segment.
Well….. There’s overlap for sure, but it’s not exactly smooth. Time to fix that. A quick smoothing out, and it already looked much better:
The biggest difference I notice after the tail arc smoothing is that looks much more natural when the beaver lands on the first log. Satisfied with my work and feeling much more comfortable with my tail abilities, I decide it’s time to move on.
- Floatation Frustration- Day One
I’ll now be discussing my process with this clip, in which the beaver turns and jumps far out of the river onto a larger log:
Surprisingly, it wasn’t the tail this time that caused me the most trouble. It was something I thought I’d gotten the hang of during the ball bounce exercise: an unrealistic trajectory. In my defense, however, the difference between the ball and the tailed rig is that this character is assumed to have some sort of muscular system he is using to propel himself, rather than using simply momentum and gravity to dictate the height and speed of his jumps.
Here is the odd “floating leap” I was having trouble with. I was animating the ball movement before adding in the tail motion when I came across this problem:
As you can see, the beaver sort of sails through the air without much realism, completely shattering the work I’d put into his weight. Cautious about what I’d find, I cracked open the graph editor to take a look under the hood:
I edited the Y-curve to be linear at the points of impact, and sped it up more at liftoff and touchdown, but it only helped marginally without really resolving the issue:
Hesitantly, I tried the X-curve:
As I’m sure you can predict (as I should’ve) that this did not solve my problem. What it did is cause the beaver to swerve around in a little detour rather than taking a diagonal path.
In the end it occured to me that I had included extreme squash on both impacts and no stretch. I tried it and sure enough, that did the trick. The long leap now looked believable, albeit cartoonish:
Oh, well. Goes to show not to forget about the simple details. I thought it fair to mention this simply because I had spent so much time trying to figure it out.
- End of Day One- the Little Hops
With my brain sizzling on the griddle I finished the last little bit of animation I had planned to reach my stopping point for the day.
The Little Hops.
The little hops were a nice easy way to phase out the day. All I had to do was make sure to keep those impact points linear.
I started work on the tail, but my brain had become scrambled eggs. I shelved the little hops to continue tomorrow with a fresh pair of eyes, looking forward to adding a jump up onto a tree limb for my sixth and final bounce. Here is the finished work for Day One, a little more than halfway done:
For the next day, I planned to finish my work on the action after landing on the log, as well as polishing up speed.
- Turn Around, Bright Eyes- Day Two
I got back to work on the little hops with new determination. The tail animation gave me no trouble at all, and I had a lot of fun with it. However I was finding a lot of trouble with the slow rotation at the beginning, in which the beaver pauses after landing before turning to jump towards the end of the log. Reminiscent of the floating leap I had dealt with earlier, I found that the turn looked extremely mechanical, despite having added some lifelike motion to the hops afterward.
Tail good, turn mechanical.
Motion curve of the little hops tail animation.
And so I tried experimenting with the turn, trying to find a less animatronic looking solution. There was to be a turn right after this too, as the beaver turns again to look at the tree branch, his next target. If I could find a way to resolve the first turn I could find a way to resolve the second and vice versa.
Ultimately, this was my decision to add some life to the turn:
I tried for a while to simply have the tail wave in the opposite direction of the turn, but the turn is too slow; it didn’t look realistic. And so I added two elements to make this turn a little more realistic.
- Little details-when the beaver lands, the tip of the tail bobs up and down briefly. I did this to add some information about the weight of the tail, as well as give an idea that the jump required some exertion and the beaver is now pausing to relax his muscles and take a breath- which I also attempted to convey by slightly squashing the ball at the same time as the tail bobs back down, which is as much as this little thing can “breathe”.
- And more noticeably, I decided instead of having the tail follow an arc, relying only on gravity, I’d instead give it a bit of musculature. I decided to have the tail sort of help propel the beaver upwards into his jump (which the “breath” earlier can also be preparation for). Although the tail does not smack the log, I gave it some wind-up action for anticipation effect; to help the beaver get ready to make his jump and put some force into it. When I was considering doing this I thought I remembered seeing a Disney film in which a beaver walks on his tail and took a brief detour down the rabbit hole, but I could only find this from Lady and the Tramp:
….My beaver propeller is somewhat of an in-between as far as this cartoonish exaggeration and the less flexible tails that real beavers do use during their work day.
This bit of animation looks a lot better now, and I believe I’ve solved the “mechanical” issue:
Yay!
V. Day Three
The home stretch was just a clip in which the beaver jumps from the log to its landing place on a tree branch. For all intents and purposes I must state that beavers can’t climb trees in real life.
The first part of this segment wasn’t too hard, just a simple long leap which gave me time to show off the classic tail animation that had now become second nature.
The second half of it was a little bit harder, I had my heart set on having the beaver do a couple little happy, short jumps to signify its excitement at having reached its destination despite its expressionless face. The difficulty with this was that I had to have the tail wave up and down twice within two very short, 10 frame movements, without coming to a rest.
After a little bit of adjusting, though, I realized that it wasn’t as hard as it seemed at first if I just ignore what the ball is doing and return my focus to the “arrow system” I described earlier- keying the tail segments to point where the last one was pointing earlier.
In the course of the two hops, the end of the tail undergoes a lot more movement than the first two tail segments do, in keeping with its relative lightness that I’ve given it throughout my animation.
I went through and fixed a couple things- most importantly, I decided that my propeller tail looks odd pointing outward off the log, and should be pointing straight out behind the beaver. Not only does this look better, but it makes more sense with the laws of physics too, as a sidelong “propellor” would either unbalance the beaver or him off course of the log. I also tidied up the speed somewhat throughout the animation. After staring at the animation for hours upon hours, I decided it was done.
Finally, here’s the finished product: