Exercises for all to see

It's been a fun old week; one reason is that I've been doing night shifts so I sleep all day, animate in the evening, and work all night. The other reason is because I've actually been doing some quick animations requested by a games company so they can see what I'm capable of. Naturally, I've been using my fresh Mikey rig for these tests to give him some airtime.

First of all, I have a second long walk cycle, which has been looped over for your convenience. (The same keyframe is kept at frames 1 and 26, with just frames 1-25 playing endlessly) The last walk cycle I properly did was a while ago now, and when I look back on it, I see how robotic it is, and you can clearly see the seam where it repeats again. I've done a couple of steps for animations since, but nothing that is meant to cycle continuously so this problem hasn't been around much for the last year or so. However, by carefully going into the graph editor, and tweaking the tangents of the ends of every curve, the seam fades away. It's not really enough to simply ease in/out the curve tangent, as you still end up with a distinct arc where the pose is unnaturally settled in, then out in a noticeable manner. The curve needs to be treated as if it's carrying on, so the gradient remains pretty much the same if need be, rather than flattening out.

Saying this, I still found the cycle to have a slight slowdown, so I just dropped the final frame so it is just 24 frames for the 2 steps, and it sped the thing up correctly.

The other piece I worked on is a 6 second clip of a box being lifted, then put on a shelf. This was somewhat harder, as I've not really interacted with a heavy object before in Maya. Fortunately, I've been lifting boxes for the last week over and over, so watching myself in the reflections of glass has given me some fine reference material. The way I actually animated this was to get the poses down first, then use the dope sheet to sort out the timing, which was a pretty good method as long as the poses were kept to single frames at first. After timing was mapped out, all the keys were offset, extra keys were added for hips, hands, the node that controlled the hands and box together, if necessary. This took me a lot longer than the walk, but I'm pretty happy with the result after half a week.

These can also be found in the 'projects' section on the website, as well as on Youtube where they are hosted.

I've really enjoyed doing these short tests; they aren't as taxing as full stories that require script reworks and the results are visible within a couple of days, yet they are still worthwhile in the end and fun to do.