Week 11: Blocking and Pivots

This past week for Senior Portfolio, I bounced between two different projects. The newest project I've been working on is the Whiplash Dance Cover animation.

I continued the blocking I started the week prior. Currently, the blocking is in time with the original clip at the timestamp 00:11. Each blocked posed is keyed at 10 seconds each. As this is still being blocked out, the timing will remain the same until the blocking is complete for tuning up the in-between poses. 

What I have noticed while blocking the poses, is that some poses look smooth when playing while others look very abrupt and stagnant. To me, this is likely due to it being in blocking and will improve once I move to the next step.

(Current animation contains poses up to 00:11 in the video)

For this animation, I'll continue working on blocking out the rest of the clip and I anticipate being in the beginning phases of smoothing out the in-betweens by next week.

 

Using the feedback from the week prior, I went ahead to experiment with pivoting on one foot for the in-between poses of the first and second punch. The goal of this change is to remove the sliding motions of the feet so that the animation reads better.

(Red is representing ideal line of action, yellow represents the current line of action)

While moving the COG and foot location to achieve this pivot, the second punch pose was drastically affected and changed. The punch came a lot closer to the punching dummy and read a lot weaker than the pose before. Additionally, the feet placement skip/slide 2 feet ahead to reach the new pose.

Looking at the playblast, the new pose needs heavy refinement and reassessment. So for this upcoming week, I'll be working on fixing these poses and redoing the second punch to keep the foot pivot.