During feedback, I was told that two things were serious faults in my original animation: footwork- feet sometimes not touching the floor or not landing for long enough to give a plausible feeling of weight- and limbs stretching too far. I was reminded that when the legs are outstretched the knee will always be bent a little, and another classmate was told that in midair, poses will always be a little softer, which was very relevant to my work too.
I needed to take a break from the gymnast, but I’m glad that I came back with more knowledge and more motivation to fix her.
I started with the midair splits that were far too exaggerated, and found they were worse than I remember.
I can’t believe I actually let it look like this before. I went in and softened that pose:
And then I went on to the next split:
As I tackled the footwork, I found a whole mess of issues.
In a lot of these, not only was the foot not touching the ground, but it was also not landing flat enough or long enough to be plausible in order to carry her weight, and oftentimes I found that the knees weren’t bending enough, which also makes the weight look a little bit less believable as she must bend her legs somewhat to catch herself after a high jump.
I found quite a few in which the feet simply were bending unnaturally:
After working on all of these, the only issue that I had left to deal with was this constant issue that’s been plaguing me of the skin on her neck moving outwards along with the ponytail.
This has prevented me from making the hair animation as dramatic as I want it to be. I searched the outliner and found many parent constraints on that top ponytail controller, but unfortunately they were labelled complicatedly and I could not hide or delete any of them. So I simply solved the issue by lessening the exaggeration of the ponytail’s movement, as much as it pained me. I really wanted to make it even more dramatic than before.
Rewatching it, I went back and added in a lot of head motion that wasn’t there before. I had originally made her simply look up or down, but this time I spend a lot more energy conveying her emotion as well as making the head bob, conveying gravity. I then added in some more expression on her face at the end, an eyebrow twitch, a slight smile, and the jaw opening and closing a little bit on her last landing to show some exhaustion.
I rendered and only found a couple small issues. One being that the camera doesn’t account for the height of her leap on the second split, another that her arms seem to whirl wildly a bit on the first jump, and third that she lurches forward clumsily going into her twirl. I accounted for all these things and re-rendered.
….And now I’m happy with it! I feel that weight and expression are both conveyed a lot better. I’m also happy with the decision to use only one camera this time, it was too confusing in such a short clip to use two. I feel confident putting this on my showreel now.