Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Classified Intel
Our animaion looks good enough to consider it complete. There are however, lots of ways
to improve it. Let's talk a bit about some procedures and ips that can be useful.
It's quite likely that if we check the movement of some elements, we will find them to
describe a trajectory that doesn't look exactly right. In the case of feet, it's possible that the
atachment to the loor isn't perfect and there is some bumping along the way. One possible
soluion to that kind of problem can be working on the curves (
Graph Editor
) for the bones
that have the undesired movement and relaxing the corresponding curves.
One of the most important aspects of the animaion of our character is the swinging of the
arms and the way the movement seems to start in the torso and come along through the
bones in the chain. We can watch our animaion carefully to check how well that efect
is achieved with our current animaion and ind spots that need to improve. For this kind
of reinement there are two possibiliies—adding extra keyframes to create new poses
or ofseing the keyframes from the current poses. The irst opion has the disadvantage
of creaing too many keyframes to work with and the second one has the problem of
disorganizing our very organized keyframes in the
Dope Sheet
.
A very important improvement would be to check that the trajectories described by the
limbs are nice arcs, for this we can use the opions available in the
Motion Paths
panel of
the
Object Data
tab of the
Properties Editor
to have a visual representaion of the paths
and check the correcions that are applied. Arcs are a very important topic in animaion, as
they are the natural trajectories described by any limb of any living creature.
Finally, there's the possibility to exaggerate the poses of our character to give it a stronger
personality. This part requires knowing about acing for animaion, which is a complex topic
by itself.
A very famous topic on animaion is the
Animator's Survival Kit
, writen by
Richard Williams. It's highly recommended by professional animators all around
forums on the Internet.
Last but not least, the armature setup that we created is a very simple one, so it will
definitely fall short when we start trying to do some complex poses with it. In the case of a
real-world character, the setup is way more complex and requires a lot of constraints and
coniguraion to create a powerful-yet-easy-to-use system. This task is accomplished by
professional riggers, who know how to create complex mechanisms to give the animators a
"puppet" that is very nice to use.
