Assignment

The assignment is to do a walk cycle and jumping from a box. This of course includes the weight shift, balance and stuff. For this assignment, I can only say that my flaw in timing made my walk cycle a poor animation. I have tried to edit it in the graph editor, the motion trail and editing it by straight ahead but the result is still poor. I had no choice but to continue on with my jump. For my jump, I am happy to say that my jumping is quite decent as I image a person from the jumping pose to the midair pose to the landing pose and I ended up with my jump animation.

References:

My walk cycle:

My jump animation:

Animation

Animation requires weight shift, balance and stuff like ease in ease out, anticipation and many more. To me, animation is way easier than rigging and its more interesting as I see results. I learned how to see the weight shift and animate it to look like it has balance. This is crucial to me as it is the basics of basics. Then I added anticipation to make it more realistic and interesting. Honestly, I have nothing to type about animation as it is the experience that I have and not a bunch of words to describe it.
This is my animation of spiderman weight shift.

This is my bigdog animation.

My flaw in animation is my timing. I am unable to have a firm foundation for timing and this makes my animation ulgy. This can only come with more practice!

Rigging

Rigging is a very tedious, tough and complex process. It requires the knowledge of human anatomy, knowledge of the limits of adjustments for each part of the body and knowledge of the different tools in Maya to acheive a basic rig.

Knowledge of the placement of basic joints to form the skeleton. As it should be simple and not as complex as the real human skeleton, Major areas where joints are needed to be able to move the model are placed in this exercise. I learned where the major areas are and also learned that the foot has three parts. I learned that different constraints are applied to different parts of the body to achieve the effect of what natural constraints the human body have. I also learned about the different solvers like RPSolver and SCSolver. I have to admit that I will avoid rigging in the future if possible as it is not only tedious but mundane.

My 3 poses:

I intended to have a kneeling pose but it was not possible with the rig I made. The fingers are also not very bendable as the polygons will be messed up if I try to bend it to the maximum. Overall, this rig is a basic showcase of rigging and rigging scares me quite abit but the knowledge of the body and the different tools is quite an experience.