In this semester’s Body Mechanics class, we conducted an initial study on character movement and expression animation, learning concepts such as head accent and phonemes. Body Mechanics is a profound discipline; from understanding the basic principles to being able to create vivid animations requires repeated practice and accumulation. This course has been of great help to the animation I will create in FMP, and I will continue to study knowledge related to body kinetics to continuously accumulate experience for future animation works.

Further polish & spline

In the expression shown in this picture, George mentioned that I need to smooth out the wrinkles at the end of the nose. When people make expressions, the end of the nose should not have overly exaggerated animation because there are no muscles in this area, only cartilage for support. Therefore, when adjusting the eyebrows, the movement at the end of the nose should be avoided.

At the same time, there are still some issues with the timing of the animation that need to be adjusted. George mentioned that when the character switches emotions, there should be a moving hold, as shown in the figure from frame 85 to 102, about one second of pause, rather than the version I made where the head keeps moving. The character’s emotion switch needs a buffer, and ensuring the head is in the moving hold stage guarantees the space for the emotion changing.

Outcome：

blocking plus

Following the previous text, in my animation, there is a process of emotional accumulation before the character speaks. In George’s feedback, he suggested that I add subtle moving hold actions to the character, such as taking a deep breath or a slight tremor of the head, to imply an emotional outburst of the character.

At the same time, there is still some problems of the basic outline of the mouth shape mentioned earlier. Even when the character makes a long “o” sound, the basic outer outline of the mouth must be maintained.

At the same time, George mentioned that it is necessary to avoid repetitive head trajectories. As shown in the figure, when the character finishes speaking and is about to change from an angry expression to a smile, the character’s head should directly shift from a forward tilt to a backward tilt. Simplifying the trajectory is an important theory. Inserting too many keyframes in the motion trajectory may undermine the aesthetics and rationality of the movement.

In the laughter at the end, one should try to keep the movement of the head subtle. While using “moving hold” again, gradually transform the character’s expression from anger to a sickly smile.

Before we head to blocking plus, there are some concepts in character animations that need to be documented.

1. moving holds

In the real world, even when humans and animals are at rest, their limbs are always engaged in subtle movements, some of which are so slight that they are imperceptible to the naked eye. Therefore, when we aim to create lifelike character animations in the 3D world, it is necessary to incorporate such minute movements, such as breathing and slight head tremors. These tiny activities can make a character appear more like a living being at rest rather than a completely motionless statue, and this technique is known as “Moving Holds”.

This video well interprets the basic principle of moving holds and how to achieve it.

In my animation, when the character says “That’s why I stopped”, there is an action of leaning forward and holding the body. At this time, the technique of Moving Holds needs to be used: making some slight undulations of the character’s trunk and head, similar to the breathing effect, to make it look more vivid.

2.Mouth shapes (phonemes)

When people speak, they can produce different syllables by coordinating different vocal resonances and mouth shapes. In animation, the changes in the mouth shapes of characters when they speak are very important. Animators need to exaggerate them and combine them with other body languages to highlight the emotions of the characters when they speak. We can notice that people’s mouth shapes have certain characteristics when they produce different syllables. Therefore, when making the animation of characters speaking, it is necessary to consider the different syllables in the lines and synchronize the mouth shapes with the dialogue.

However, the faces of cartoon characters do not have as rich a muscle group as real human faces to drive expressions. Therefore, when creating mouth shape changes, we must simplify the changes in mouth shapes and adjust the mouth shape specifically by identifying the main syllables in the sentence. For example, when someone says “How’s it going”, the mouth shape is like saying “howzit goin”. So when making animations, we only need to extract the main syllables and create the corresponding mouth shape changes.

Blocking-1

First of all, there was a problem from the starting pose of the first frame. I adjusted the character’s shoulder controller to an abnormal Angle, and the shoulders sank strangely. Secondly, the character’s head orientation is also overly to the right. It should be slightly adjusted to the left to ensure that the character’s eyes are in contact with those of the character they are talking to.

Another very important point is to ensure that the shapes of the eyes and lips have certain edges rather than being composed of pure curves. As shown in the picture, when the character makes an angry expression, we hope that the character’s mouth maintains a trapezoidal shape, with the corners of the mouth pulled down and teeth exposed at the same time. The same principle applies to the eyes. It is very important to avoid any sharp corners on the eyelid contour and to form the facial features with smooth lines.

It can be seen that even the hand-drawn style facial features summarized by curves still have a certain geometric form. It is very important to maintain the same idea in the animation to ensure the good form of the facial features.

The first week’s blocking mainly focused on the movement of the body and the adjustment of the animation rhythm. Next week’s blocking plus will refine the movement of the facial features in more detail.

1. Choose dialogue audio material

In the second part, we focused on the expression animation of the characters. This part only pays attention to the movement of the upper part of the character’s chest cavity and emphasizes the character’s performance and emotional release. We were asked to select a piece of the dialogue of a film and create character expression animations that fit the scene based on it.

We need to draw a plan, including the dialogue content, changes in characters’ expressions and characters’ personalities. I chose Stan from the movie Leon, a neurotic murderer character.

In the dialogue I selected, stan was talking about Beethoven’s music with the victim before the murder. At the end of the dialogue, he had a huge emotional change, from a slight anger to a slightly crazy laugh. The lines were condensed to only one sentence: “That’s why I stopped! Hahahahaha….”

2. Reference Video

A qualified animator always needs to take himself as a reference and experience the movements personally. Only in this way can we better understand the body mechanics principles behind the movements.

During the process of George constantly giving me suggestions, I kept adjusting and trying to act out the emotions contained in the lines. This is the result of the third version:

We’ll start making blocking next time. See you next post:)

Spline animation

Once the blocking is done, the animation will be dedicated to spline and the rhythm and keyframes will continue to be adjusted.

In the feedback of this frame, George pointed out that when the character rotates the upper body, the legs should not have any movement and should remain the same as the starting pose.

It should be noted that for the issues already mentioned in the previous article and to avoid very hard turns in the body contour, the limb turns should be processed into smooth angles as much as possible to form a beautiful curved contour.

After further adjustments, I obtained the following animation and completed the short animation of the Spider-Man martial arts performance. At this stage, the first part of the Body Mechanics animation came to an end.

Outcome:

In this pose, the right leg, which serves as a support, needs to be drawn to the left to enhance the arc of the human body and increase the dynamic sense of the character. At the same time, extend the right arm backward to avoid the visual imbalance caused by overlapping with the trunk. In fact, this principle is extremely important. In any character animation, especially for large-scale movements, it is necessary to avoid excessive overlap of the limbs and the trunk in the character silhouette as much as possible, as this will cause a sense of visual deficiency.

It can be noticed that in this frame, George left me the annotation “toe contact”, that is, in this frame, the left foot of the character does not touch the ground with the entire sole of the foot, but only the toes touch the ground. At this time, the weight of the character is still on the right leg and gradually shifts to the left leg. Therefore, it is wrong to land the left sole of the foot completely directly.

In this frame, it should be noted that for the sole of the right foot, the toes should touch the ground and be in the same direction as the lower leg. Similar to the previous pose, the figure’s center of gravity shifts from one side to the other, and along with the body stretching to the left, the right leg stretches accordingly, thus lifting the right sole to complement the stretching.

As mentioned above, always ensure that the curves of the character are smooth.

Blocking-1

The starting position is a squat to accumulate energy for subsequent rapid movements.

Based on the starting position, the second pose make a rotation with the hip joint as the axis. George mentioned in the feedback that it is necessary to ensure that the outline of the character’s silhouette is smooth and avoid sharp turns in the character’s limb outline, etc. Therefore, modifications need to be made based on the green notes.

George gave me some advice on this pose: Don’t copy the movement in the reference, follow the principle mentioned above to ensure smooth contours. Lift the left leg of the character and tilt the entire body to the left, shaping the whole person into a shape similar to a “bow” to highlight the smooth outlines.

1. Planning the animation

Reference:

I was planning to make an animation of a martial arts performance and selected the video shown in the above picture. However, due to time constraints, only five seconds of it were chosen. The movements in martial arts performances are coherent and aesthetically pleasing, which is also the reason why I chose it as a reference.

Plan:

Before the blocking part, it is necessary to analyze the key actions of the characters within the sequence frames in chronological order to better present the movement trends and trajectories of the characters. As shown in the figure, I marked the arrangement of the character actions at 60 frames and 24 frames respectively in blue and green, and annotated the movement rhythms of each part of the actions using notes. By drawing the movement trajectories of the characters’ limbs, I can better understand the dynamics of the characters.