Animation - stage 1
Animation is not my strong suit by any means. I am also not a character artist or designer. So this whole thing was different for me. I have had to do both character modelling and animation before. However, all of the stuff I have learnt along this process has been with a new software that I only started learning about 10 months ago.
So where did I start?
Well I will try to break the animation down for those who don't really understand how characters are animated.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yHF1PcreIY&t=755s
1. pose your character in a T pose.
Step one is easy, you simply have to ensure your character is in a T pose as this makes things a hell of a lot easier for the next steps. If you studied games art you would have learnt this whilst being taught how to model characters. To be put simply, T pose is where a character will stand with there arms out straight to the sides and with their legs apart. This will help with animation as it means that there will be no random deformations later on down the line
Scratch that. There will be not as many difficult deformations to fix is what I should have said.
2. Adding in an Armature.
Step 2 is very simple as well, all you have to do is add in an armature. An armature is essentially a wireframe of how a character looks.
(This is what my armature looked like after I finished posing it)
3. Change the armature so that it suits your character.
Your character is an individual - just like a real person. Therefore, it will not have an average structure in terms of length of arms, legs, torso etc. So you need to modify the armature to fit in with the placements of all of your characters body parts.
4. Make sure to apply armature weights to your character.
So, weighting is one of the worst processes, for me personally, because I can never get it right. I wish there were a golden rule for how much to set for each individual bone.
For those who don't understand weighting, you now have to 'skin' your character mesh and then apply weights to certain bones so that the mesh will bind to that bone and deform accordingly. A lot of big words there... Basically putting skin on a skeleton and making the skin around the bones squish and stretch in the correct way.
5. Re weighting.
You'll never get the skinning correct the first time - so now we apply the weights and go through them all again and again to ensure no random deformations are happening. Like this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yHF1PcreIY&t=755s
6. Finally making a rig that is easier to use than these bloody bones!
At this stage we try and simplify the bones into a 'rig' so that we can bend and manipulate them in a more verisimilitudinous way (In a more realistic way). This involves assigning limbs with IK (Inverse Kinematics) to the end of each bone chain so that they will all move together.
7. Animating
So after all that hard work we are finally ready to animate! By using 'keyframes' and the rig we just created we can easily produce a good quality animation. Keyframes are exactly what they sound like 'key frames'. They are the frames in the animation that we chose and then move around the rig. When you've made multiple keyframes the computer will fill in the points from keyframe A to keyframe B. This is nice because it means a hugely reduced amount of work, however, it makes the animation more robotic in a sense and can also remove from an overly exaggerated and more human like animation.
I am still animating my golem at this point in time (I have had a lot to do this past week, so I will update you next wee on how it is going, but below is the beginning of my animation stages).
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