Post 18 - Task One Injury Animation & Evaluation

After a lot of research and working out the software, I have completed my Task One 'Main Animation'. This animation is 1000 frames long, which about 34 seconds in length. The sequence shows a walk cycle, which deteriorates into a limp and holding of the side. This then worsens with the other leg or knee becoming troublesome. This then finally ends with the character stumbling and falling. During the sequence, the character can also been seen to blink, and incorporates a level of facial expression, which adds to conveying distress, or injury.

In my opinion, I think that this is a success and fulfills the brief. It demonstrates a good understanding of what is involved in animating a full figure character and shows a brief knowledge of the effective use of a sweeping.rotating camera. However, as with any developmental work, there are some negative points. Firstly, in certain key frames the character's right hand (during the second phase of the walk cycle) appears to move away from the side of the body that it is suppose to be clenching. Although this was overcome by manipulating established key frames and adding additional  ones in, I personally still notice these little blips. Also, once I had a significant amount of key frames, I needed to extend the length of the time-line. However, when doing this the key frames were given a sort of 'squashed' look and made it much harder to separate frames which were close together. In addition, this animation technically only has four stages (walk, limp, severe limp, stumble/fall) I feel that it would of been more interesting to incorporate an additional stage (maybe a crawl cycle in between the third one and the stumble) Had I of had more time, this is what I would of looked into doing. Also, from looking into the 'Blade Runner' research, I feel that the character would of benefited from being injured s a reaction to something (i.e. shot or hit) This is something that I may develop in a later project.

To sum up, this process was a very intriguing one and allowed me to further my understanding of how to key frame a rigged model effectively. I picked up and built on knowledge about how to duplicate key frames and to manipulate facial and full figure motion. This task also helped me to understand the time line of 3Ds Max and how to gauge at what point to insert key frames. I have picked up a variety of methods for reducing the amount of time it takes to animate and was a very good insight into what considerations and planning are necessary; from acting out certain poses, to understanding the relationship and weight between a model's limbs and the situation they have been put into.

It is my hope that will learn from this task and continue to improve on my skills of this medium. I would also like to focus more attention to the motion capture and motion-builder route in the near future.