Now that all 3 of my animations have been completed, there are several things that I could perhaps improve upon. One thing I noticed with my animations is that some of the animations had quite jerky movements instead of more fluid ones, which is a result of using keyframes every x frames. If there is a way of smoothing out these animations in blender then I would like to go back and redo them.
Also, weight painting the vertices was a fairly difficult process, since the mesh would sometimes deform while trying to animate a pose, so I would have to keep going to Weight Paining mode and attempt to fix the deformation. All in all, I am relatively happy with the results, especially as I believe the animations closely resemple their real life counterparts.
Thursday, 13 May 2010
Monday, 10 May 2010
Saturday, 8 May 2010
Weight Lifting
For the last animation, I chose to do an animation of a weight lifter lifting up a barbell. As I have done before, I used the reference videos to get a good starting pose for the animations as I find this is the best way to animate. Unlike the other two videos, I decided to create a mesh for a barbell, as this would not only improve the animation visually but also help me get a goot reference point of the hand positions.
Once this was done, I used the same technique I had used in the rower animation. This time however, I did not animate to the video exactly, but instead used it as a rough guide for my poses. Everytime the weight lifter in the reference video made a different movement (i.e. going from crouching to standing), I made a keyframe in the animation and replicated that piece of movement's starting and finishing position.
The process was a lot harder to make as I first thought, since there were issues such as the barbell going through the knees of the mesh in which I would have to re-adjust the position of the mesh before attempting the animation again. Something else that was different was that I would also have to keep changing the position of the barbell to keep it in the arms of the weight lifter.
Once this was done, I used the same technique I had used in the rower animation. This time however, I did not animate to the video exactly, but instead used it as a rough guide for my poses. Everytime the weight lifter in the reference video made a different movement (i.e. going from crouching to standing), I made a keyframe in the animation and replicated that piece of movement's starting and finishing position.
The process was a lot harder to make as I first thought, since there were issues such as the barbell going through the knees of the mesh in which I would have to re-adjust the position of the mesh before attempting the animation again. Something else that was different was that I would also have to keep changing the position of the barbell to keep it in the arms of the weight lifter.
Sunday, 2 May 2010
Row row row your boat.
Now that I am animating a rower, I once again chose a starting pose for the rower using the videos as a reference. For the starting pose, I chose to have the legs at their most bent and the arms out stretched as this would be easiest to animate.
Once I was happy with the pose, I moved up the timeline 20 frames and created a middle pose (which is pretty much the pose that is half way though a cycle) where the legs were this time extended and the arms bent.
From here on in, it was just a case of filling in the blanks between the poses. It was quite useful that blender does most of the work when filling in the animation between keyframes, but there was still some tinkering to be done in aligning the position of the hands and wrists so that they follow a straight line instead of wobbling up and down.
There were several problems with the weight painting I came across while animating the rower, such as the balance bone having some vertices assigned to it. As a result, when I would drag the bones in the torso back and forth to simulate the rowing stroke, some vertices would be pulled out of positon do to the balance bone pulling on them. I managed to assign the vertices to the hip bone instead to get around this proble.
As with the running animation, the pose in the first frame of the animation was copied and pasted to form the last frame, although it did not need to be flipped. The animation was also lengthened to 240 frames using the action editor.
Once I was happy with the pose, I moved up the timeline 20 frames and created a middle pose (which is pretty much the pose that is half way though a cycle) where the legs were this time extended and the arms bent.
From here on in, it was just a case of filling in the blanks between the poses. It was quite useful that blender does most of the work when filling in the animation between keyframes, but there was still some tinkering to be done in aligning the position of the hands and wrists so that they follow a straight line instead of wobbling up and down.
There were several problems with the weight painting I came across while animating the rower, such as the balance bone having some vertices assigned to it. As a result, when I would drag the bones in the torso back and forth to simulate the rowing stroke, some vertices would be pulled out of positon do to the balance bone pulling on them. I managed to assign the vertices to the hip bone instead to get around this proble.
As with the running animation, the pose in the first frame of the animation was copied and pasted to form the last frame, although it did not need to be flipped. The animation was also lengthened to 240 frames using the action editor.
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