IMD 4003: Character Animation IV

For IMD 4003: Computer Animation, taught by Chris Joslin

Contents

1. 1. Poses
   1. 1.1 Posing Body Parts
   2. 1.2 Line of Action
2. 2. Animating with Poses
   1. 2.1 Two Types of Animation
   2. 2.2 Key Frames

1. Poses

Posing is the way a character presents themselves in front of a camera to clarify their actions and emotions.

1.1 Posing Body Parts

Posing Bodies

• Balance: We are always trying to maintain balance - not tipping over. If the centre of balance is off, your character will look like they are about to tip over.
• Anatomical Correctness: This means that you should keep the joints positioned and rotating within their natural limits, otherwise you will make people feel uncomfortable with the movement.

Posing the Hips and Torso

• Hips support the weight of the upper body and distribute this through the legs to the ground. When we pick up an object, the object's weight needs to be balanced by our body.
• Most motions start with a change in the character's hips because most motions begin with a change in balance.

Posing the Legs and Feet

• Feet: Weight is mostly on the heel of the foot and the ball is used to fine-tune the weight distribution.
• Knees: These tend to follow the direction in which the foot is pointing.

Posing the Hands and Arms

• Index Finger: This is the dominant finger, with decreasing dominance as you move towards the pinky.
• Grasping and Manipulating: The least dominant fingers will curl first when you go to close your hand around something. If you are picking up a heavy object, you would use your entire hand. Delicate objects may only require a few fingers.

1.2 Line of Action

The line of action is useful for making poses seem fluid. The line is drawn from the tips of the toes to the tips of the fingers.

2. Animating with Poses

2.1 Two Types of Animation

1. Straight-Ahead Animation

• This is a linear progression through the frames starting from the beginning and working to the end.
• Good for spontaneous and complex motion such as athletic actions.
• Bad for getting well-defined and solid poses.

2. Pose-to-Pose Animation

• 1^st: Plan the shot by setting out the main poses of the character. 2^nd: Break down every action into a series of poses. 3^rd: Create the 'tweens.
• Good for acting and dialogue because each pose can be fitted to the major points in the dialogue track.

2.2 Key Frames

These are typically used to define the position or pose of the character but can also be used to define the colour, shape or transparency.

Motion Graphs

These use curves to indicate exactly how much to move an object in between a set of key frames.

Dope Sheets

These display the key frames as blocks without the curves. It's good because you can change the timing without changing the curves. Also, it allows you to select the key frames for a specific group of objects without manually selecting each part. For example, if you want to move the entire arm, you would just select the 'arm' block and it would move the 'hand' block as well.

Trajectories

Trajectories for objects can help plan out shots.

Ghosting

Ghosting permits you to see multiple exposures of an object. This is good for visualizing objects in motion, especially complex objects.