Animation

It's taken a lot of work to get to the fun stuff. With Jason proving himself not only an amazing modeler, but a competent rigger as well we're finally at the point where we can start bringing stuff to life. So the first shot is pretty long and involves an immediate introduction to one of our characters. This shot is about 700 or so frames long. This immensely long shot also reveals out creature and then cuts to the scene posted here. To keep up with our soldier and find out what he's up to our creature here has to keep up as inconspicuously as possible. One of the best ways Jason and I thought this could be done was by having the creature take full advantage of its environment. Since my idea of this otherworldly desert included rock spires it was hard to avoid the notion of the visual of our creature jumping from one to the other. The spires had always been part of our original environment design as can be seen in the concept sketch in the post below.

Research for the shot began by watching a whole lot of Animal Planet. Anything that included the behavior of big cats was Tivo'd without question. Youtube proved to be pretty useless here. What was captured from Animal Planet was put to sketchpad, but a lot of the footage proved to be either too hard to read or was shot at a very useless angle (front, back, etc.). What was really needed was a nice profile view of a big cat jump. Since finding live action for this was proving to be just as much a challenge as animating the scene itself, I decided to turn to what I consider to be the film with the single best big cat animation in film history; Disney's The Jungle Book.

Look at Bagheera's fantastic animation really made the anatomy of a big cat jump clear. The bunching up and almost full body collection of power before the jump, the near relaxation during the apex of the jump, and the sudden compression and decompression of the body during the landing was easy to extract from a number of key scenes from the film. What also helped was watching some animation from Blizzard's World of Warcraft. There are a number of big cat creatures in the game and the use of a free program called the WoW Model Viewer proved to be an essential tool in dissecting out what I needed for the shot. For you Blizzard fans out there, I referenced a lot of animation from the Druid Cat.

Depending on the needs of the shot, I generally animate with a combination of pose-to-pose and straight ahead animation. In terms of pose-to-pose I like to sketch out thumbnails of all the major positions. I then tap out the timing using either my metronome or just counting off seconds in my head and imagining the motion. After that I jump straight into Maya. The straight ahead approach comes from all the minor movements in between the major movements that I had already planned. I've found that animating this way lays down a really strong foundation for my scene, but leaves it open to some rather nice and sometimes surprising spontaneous action that I had not planned for or extracted from my research.

I generally like animating straight in spline, but for this jump that traversed a pretty long distance, I knew something was going to have to be different. My first take was a good lesson in this. The jump lacked energy and a nice clean rhythm. It seemed clumsy and ill defined. For my second take at this shot I decided that the best way to animate this scene was in stepped mode with flat tangents. This allowed me to make clear definitions of all of my key poses and nail the timing. After setting and tweaking all the needed key poses I selected all of my controls, selected all of my keys in the graph editor, and converted them to clamped mode. I should also note that I set Maya to playback all frames as opposed to the more traditional 24 frames per second playback. This allowed me to view a more accurate playback speed. I was later able to define the traditional 24 frames per second spec in the video conversion stage after render.

In my experience I've found that for a really cushioned texture to the animation, spline is the best way to go. However, if a more realistic and defined movement is needed then clamped is the surefire way to go. Converting from stepped to either clamped or spline is never a straightforward approach. In fact, it can seem to almost ruin the animation as the computer takes control of the inbetweens and literally re-animates your scene. After settling the urge to scream at the computer and threaten its fate to the gods, the next major step is tweaking the tangents in the graph editor. One of the major tweaks needed was getting a natural feel for the jump. Computers never take gravity into account so the translate Y curve for the ALL control of the creature was going to need the most attention. Basically the a good jump will necessitate the shape of an upside U for the translate Y axis. To achieve this I took Chuck Grieb's, my 3D animation teacher, suggestion for weighting, freeing, and in some cases, breaking the tangents. Weighting the tangents enables them for such modifications as freeing. Freeing the tangent allows the animator more control over the influences a key has on a graph line. This really gave me the ability to get that nice upside down U for the jump behavior. I was finally able to convey a sudden burst of energy, a slow gradual losing fight with gravity, and an exponential accelerating drop to the other rock spire.

After some major tweaking and fighting with the all too dreaded gimbal lock phenomenon I was able to nail the performance. One of the best things about animating this scene was the amount of knowledge gained from it. I learned a brand new approach to animating a scene and when to use it. I want to give a shout out to my buddy and partner Jason for the model work and the fantastic rig that I now have to work with. Can't wait to post more.