The three animations I am planning to make will be strung together into one long animation that will be 30 seconds in the end but the separate actions will be 10 seconds each and the ideas for those are as follows:
A walk into a run to a jump over a gap.
Some sort of obstacle course or parkour section this can be replaced with something else if needs be or just straight into fight then 3rd action.
A fight scene with another android.
To create my animations I will be using The Animator’s Survival Kit (Williams, 2009) to help me understand how the actions work and the timing for each of them its better to use a reference rather than getting confused as to how my animations are working.
The main principles I will be trying to focus on are Anticipation, Staging, Arc’s & Follow Through
Although these are the ones that will be focused on the most there may be accidental or not as focused principles besides these ones in my animations.
Pose to pose will be used throughout as it’s the most efficient way to animate by putting in keyframes first and then tweaking the ones in between those Keyframes you don’t have to worry about every frame as some might already look good so they don’t need to be changed however this does lead to more jank if you don’t do it correctly.
To create the animations I will be using a new technique called the NLA or non-lineier animator which from what I can tell is mainly used to make looping animations so I can take my animations and just loop them rather than wasting time reanimating the same thing 3 or 4 times over such as a walk cycle.
Below is a series of test renders in blender to see how they look outside of the viewport since I get low frames a second on my PC in the viewport.
Just the key leg frames for a walk on 12 frames.
Walk on 12 frames with the rest of the joints animated.
Walk on 12 frames but longer
Just the leg frames for a walk on six frames
Rest of the bones for walk on six frames
Longer walk on six frames
To see how it looks when together I strung both the walk and fast walk together into one long animation above before making the run animation.
Run on six frames just the legs however keeping the fast walk arms.
Run on six frames with the added arm animations
Longer Run on six frames
Quick Closeup run on six frames
Second quick closeup for run on six frames however I changed the Framerate to 18FPS rather than 24 as its a multiple of 6 and slows it down a little.
I then strung all 3 actions together with a couple of small transitions that are barely noticeable but reduce the jank in areas to make one long sequence the first one will be over 10 seconds but that’s ok.
By this point, I had a better clearer picture of what I wanted it to be the scene was going to be a bridge that has a chase scene one android (Abalon) and a second android (just a random one) are running across the bridge when for some reason (Just plot) a section falls out of the bridge forcing Abalon to jump to the other side and pull himself up then get into a fight sequence or add in the parkour of jumping across the bridge Im not 100% sure there yet I’ll make the bridge fall then decide.
So I modeled a quick bridge scene to be used in this and added in some textures I plan to add in an ocean below the bridge but for now, I will leave it blank or just add a blue plane to fake it.
Williams, R., 2009. The Animator’s Survival Kit. 1st ed. London: Faber & Faber Limited.
