Notes
When I watched the video detailing the corrections I must make, the audio did not work, but I was able to get the gist of it. My biggest issue with the first attempt was the reason for the “jolty” movement, and also was the cause of my major confusion pertaining to the root controls. I had been frustrated that there were several purple controls that were “tied” to the ground and could not figure out whether my entire animation was incorrect because of it. Turn out, I was right that the controls shouldn’t move, but I made a major mistake in assume that one of them should.
My biggest problem was that I animated the root control and moved individual parts of the spine to match, rather than animating all the forward motion directly from the motion control. This is what gave the knight a “stop motion-y” look and made it much harder on me than it needed to be. If you compare the original with the new version you’ll see that it’s a lot smoother and looks more effortless.
Another thing I focused on is overlap. I dug deeper into the graph editor and made sure that with all motion comes a secondary and tertiary motion, similar to the tailed ball exercise, and the Aang rig we discussed in class. The shoulder swings forward, then the elbow, then the wrist. The base of the spine, then the middle, then the top, then the neck.
I completed the motion of the feet and legs first, trying my hardest to make my work indistinguishable from Luke’s first two steps he gave me as an example. Although that’s an extremely lofty goal for me right now, I did okay. A big part of that was making sure that my steps were not too big, and that the forward motion of the body correlated realistically with the body language and a comfortable walking pace. I edited most of my steps to be smaller and smaller. In my original storyboard, I’d drawn quite large steps, in an effort to emphasize the walk style,
-but when translated to animation, these large steps looked like jolty lunges and seemed unrealistic and unbalanced. I finished the foot motion much more conservatively, and, looking back, I decided to go in and add a more cartoony heel and toe roll, to make the steps a little bit less robotic.
When I went about animating it the second time, I was able to complete my animation within two days, rather than the five it originally took me, not to mention the fact that it looks better. This was a source of immense pride for me. There were a couple little stylistic details I went back and added in at the end just because I liked them, though somewhat toned down, like the enthusiastically respectful flair when the knight bears his shield and brings his fist to his chest as he kneels in front of….. his offscreen commander.