This one I actually found to be the most challenging of the body mechanics tasks. I found its difficultly along the same lines as doing a walk cycle, but having the entire body ascend as it moves. This was my result:
Another weight exercise. This time I wanted to portray a character getting up from a nap on their bed, and having the bed be raised so the character’s feet wouldn’t be touching the ground, they would have to drop slightly. This was the result:
A fairly straightforward exercise in weight and character. I decided to go for a bouncy, excitable yet elegant female character who would leap onto her seat yet sit with a pose that would make anyone assume that she was in charge of her friend group. This was the result:
After adding some movement in the neck, head, shoulders, eyes and arms the overall animation appears to look a lot more natural. I also added a gentle camera zoom along with substituting the audio with the more cinematic sounding segment to make the character seem all the more threatening. Overall I am very pleased with the result.
The audio I decided to use was an extract from one of my favourite games of all time, Portal 2. The reason why I chose audio from this game is because all of the characters are mouthless robots, so there’s no possible way for me to copy their mouth movements.
I chose this scene to animate because of the heightened emotion of the characters and the intense facial expressions that could be made if only the characters were human.
As someone who has been animating for almost a decade, I am very familiar with lip syncing. Some examples of my work are in these videos below.
So, all in all, I’m fairly well versed in the moving of mouths to the sound of voices. It was only a matter of transferring my knowledge into 3 Dimensions.
To begin with animating weight, I turned once more to the Animator’s Survival Kit.