Week 10: Spline and Block Outs

This past week for Senior Portfolio, I worked on some tweaking COG movements and punches for my SpinKick animation. I also worked on starting some blocking poses for my new animation, inspired by a dance cover.

For the SpinKick animation, I went back to the graph editor and deleted some keyframes that kept the animation too stiff, even in spline. After doing so, I worked on smoothing out the curves on the Y-rotations of the COG controller get the smoother movement. Afterwards, I did some minor changes on the impact of the second punch as it still needed some fixing to collide with the dummy.

I found that making these changes made the animation smoother. The punches and the kick do read significantly better than they did a few weeks ago. Additionally, the COG movement looks better and for the in-between poses of the punches. 

 I do think it needs some more fixes on timing and the apex of the kick hitting the dummy. Overall, the animation should be ready to playblast for the final render by next week. 

While looking and re-evaluating my initial plan for animation at the beginning of the semester, I decided to switch out my next dialogue piece to be done in 2D. I was looking to do another animation focusing on body mechanics and with a new rig I had found. I found this dance cover of Whiplash by Aespa, an all-girl KPOP group, on TikTok and decided to take it on as my next project.

Using a new rig I found on GumRoad by Yang Xiao, I decided this rig would be perfect for this type of animation.

https://xiaoy96.gumroad.com/SpiderSilkMayaRig

( Original Source: https://www.tiktok.com/@cleyoowww/video/7431218019205926160 )

I first worked on identifying the key poses to block out. After figuring out the first few, I dove into blocking. I had some trouble figuring out how extreme to do certain poses for this dance. Overall, the process of this animation has had me replicating certain poses myself as the video only captures from the front camera. There is a bit of buffer when recreating these poses as the TikToker has large baggy pants, and requires me to estimate certain poses for the legs. But, I'm excited to see how this turns out after the blocking phase.