Category: Term 3 3D Animation

SPLINE

BLOCKING 2

In the second blocking, there were still some problems pointed out by the instructor.

In a head-turning action, the head and body rotate too quickly, with only 4 frames of time. This time can be appropriately extended.

When the character pronounces the DT sound, the teeth need to be closed.

The character’s movement range is still too large and needs to be reduced appropriately。

The instructor gave me some suggestions on my blocking this week:

1. The range of body movement is too large, including the reference I took myself. So I re-photographed the reference and got the approval of my instructor.

2. Modifications to the face animation：

In this pose, the eyebrows do not form a perfect arc. Although it is a frowning expression, the corners of the mouth are still upturned. Lowering the corners of the mouth can better reflect the character’s emotions.

The best position of the eyeball is within the eye socket.

The range of facial rotation can be reduced appropriately, and the angle of the face needs to be changed so that the camera can capture the other half of the person’s face.

Finally, the eyebrows can be divided into three sections. The front section is close to the center of the eyebrows, followed by the middle section and the back section. Among the three sections, the front section has the largest movement range, followed by the middle section, and the back section has a very small movement range. This is what you need to pay attention to when making eyebrow animations.

BLOCKING

Since I have done mouth animation before, I first created the mouth pose for each syllable, and then I animated the rest of the body.

In this new section, we are asked to create a mouth animation. This section focuses solely on the movement of the character’s upper chest, highlighting their performance and emotional expression. We were tasked with selecting a piece of film dialogue and creating character expression animations that accurately reflect the emotion and context of the scene.

We are required to develop a plan that outlines the dialogue, the progression of the character’s expressions, and their personality traits. For my project, I chose Stan from the film Léon: The Professional, a character known for his neurotic and violent nature.

I chose this passage as my line：

This is a reference:

According to the advice given by my instructor, I changed the position of the camera and some poses, and then made the whole animation into a spline.

In this part, I continued to make changes to the blocking based on the advice given to me by my instructor.

First of all, in this pose, my idea was that because the character was hit by a punch, the character would produce a body distortion effect when retreating. But I still overlooked a very important factor, which is the beauty of each pose and the curvature of each joint.

In this pose, I accepted the advice given by my instructor, which was to make the character’s two arms wave involuntarily, so as to show that the character is trying hard to control his body shape after losing his center of gravity.

In this pose, the instructor emphasized that I could continue to increase the range of movement of my shoulders to make this pose full of tension.

In the last pose, the instructor made the same request, letting the character rush forward and directly cross the camera, which can also provide tension for the entire animation.

In this part, I made blocking animation according to the reference.

In the beginning action, I put the character in the lower right corner. I would have the character enter the camera from the lower right corner, but according to the instructor’s suggestion, I hope to enter the camera directly from behind the camera. And because my character will be punched, there may be facial animation, but according to the assignment requirements, facial animation is not required, so the instructor suggested adding glasses to the character.

Regarding this keyframe, when I first made it, I only focused on the continuity of the front and back movements, but ignored the beauty of the pose itself. The character’s entire body was very distorted and not very stretched. The instructor suggested stretching the entire body to form a perfect arc, and slightly modifying the front and back movements to make them more coherent.

In this pose, my original plan was to let the entire left leg draw an arc in the air, which is the starting frame, but I overlooked a very critical problem, that is, both the character’s arms and legs are facing the camera, and the left leg just blocks the shape of the right leg, which cannot appear in the animation.

According to the advice given by my tutor, I changed my plan. I will delete one character and only animate one character, but the whole scene is still in one ring.

This is the newest reference：

Plan the animation:

As a first idea, I want to make an animation about wrestling, because wrestling is mostly about big movements, which can easily make some tense animations. My idea is to make an animation about RKO, which will have two characters involved. The first character will quietly enter the ring from the back and use RKO to attack the other character. If time is limited, I will replace the first character with a sandbag.

Thumbnail：

I broke down the animation into 19 actions. The ones marked with triangles are minor keyframes, and the ones marked with circles are major keyframes.

reference: