TITLE: Reflection for Project 2
In project 2, we are required to create two animations that include the walking cycle and another movement of your choice for the robot. Hence, i've chosen the skipping cycle for this project.
Walk cycle
For the walk cycle, we need to create an animation based on the mani rig given by the lecturer. Besides, the rig, we are also given sketches of how the robot should walk.
In order to make this animation more realistic, we need to know how a human walk and implement them into the mani rig. The right arm moves forward with the left leg and the left arm and right left will remain behind to support the balance. Next, the left arm and right leg moves forward while the right arm and left leg would stay behind and this makes it a whole cycle to allow mani to walk. Besides, not only knowing how a human walk, we also need imagination on how it should walk. For example, should the hips move to its left or right while changing lefts or should the head be lowered while making a step forward. All these contribute to a more clean and realistic walk movements.
Moreover, the rotations of the legs are important in making a realistic walk. For example, the curves of the rotation X for the legs need to be considered while making the animation. I believe that the curves for each legs should be smooth and not jagged in order to make the mani walk smoothly. Hence, below are the screenshot of my graph for my walk cycle, they have smooth curves which make it walk smoothly.
Rotate X of the right leg
Rotate X of the left leg
Below are the videos of my end product for my walk cycle in different angles.
Side View
Front View
Angle View
Skipping cycle
For the second part of project 2, we need to come up with an animation with our desired movement. Hence, i have chosen the skipping cycle. In order to create a realistic animation, as mentioned above too, i need refer to the guide provided by my lecturer as references.
In anyone's perspective, skipping is known to be an action when a person is happy or happy things happened. Hence, in order to make mani look like he is happily skipping, the movement must be faster and it must be a little "bouncy" - need to focus on the legs movement more.
Here are the videos of my end product in different angle.
Front view
4
Side view
Angled View
Overall, this project make me realize how to create a basic animation movement (walk and skip) and i enjoyed doing them.
What do I expect before doing this project?
Before doing this project, i expected that we need to understand more about the movement. For example walk, we need to know more on how a human walk before we can implement the details into the animation - does the hips move to the left or right while moving forward. Besides these, we also need to know the basics about the principles of animation. These principles give us a more vivid idea on how the animation will turn out to be or should be. Hence, I believe these points are important in making an animation and making them more realistic/
What do i want to improve or in my animation?
I am relieved that my movements for both the walk and skip cycle are smooth and clean. After consulting the lecturer about my skipping cycle, he said that my moves are too rough and when the mani was moving his legs forward, he was shaking a little. Hence, after listening to his comments, i've decided to edit the curves of the rotateX in the graph editor and make it a more smoother curve. I believe that by having a smoother curve in the graph, it will make the mani walk/skip smoothly too. Besides, i do want to improve on my mani expression. For example, a happy expression while his skipping.
What have i learnt?
In this project, i learnt many stuffs such as editing the curves in the graph, understanding the movements of a human and controlling different rigs. I believe that after learning these, i am able to do a better animation as compared to my first animation. These stuffs allow me to control the movements more and make it more realistic than a stiff animation. Hence, these are important in making a good animation and i can still implement these in the near future.