Light From the Dark - Production report 1

Unfortunatly, Lone Wolf has been cancelled or temporarily put on hold for the final third year bachelor project, and I have moved over to another project that I was still attached to that uses 3D animation.

Yesterday the project went into high gear as everyone has finished they're dissertations, and finally have enough time to focus on getting into post-production phase. For now I am doing test animation for the protagonist, practicing on various physical motions that will be in the film, as such it will help speed up the animation process. 

Here the protagonist falls down after a sudden hit.

It was a bit tricky to make the fall look believable since the movements had a tendency to be jagged.

Another tricky thing was to get the FK joints to do what I wanted since they went a bit crazy as I turned the rig in a horisontal position, so I had to plenty of clean up for just that few second clip.

I started off by posing the rig in a free fall position and then animating the entire body to fall and slide in one motion, and then I animated each limb and body movement to correspond with the impact.

The protagonist is trying to shut a heavy door, using her body strength.

This one was to test myself in physical acting, just as in the fall test, because it's important to get the audience to believe that she is having a hard time closing the door. As such I keyframed places in which her body would move slower as she pushed to simulate resistance, and move it fast back as an opposite effect.

This is a basic running cycle to get myself acquainted with efficently posing and keyframing a run cycle.

Sometimes it can get tricky since the timing might be off by a tiny milisecond and throw you off by how unsymmetrical her running is. I keyframed each pose three frames at the time to make sure her running was as smooth as possible, and give the illusion of fast running. I ended up not having to do much animation for her feet since you barely making them out, but I added toe rolls on each kick since I didn't want to cut corners.