Week 10: Dynamic Poses and Holds

 For Senior Portfolio, I ended up focusing a bit more on my side project this week. This meant refining some poses to be more dynamic and adding some in-betweens to help smooth out some clipping on the extremities.

Most of my time was spent adjusting smaller controllers like shoulders, torso, and toes to create smoother and more dramatic poses. This was especially helpful in allowing for more extreme reaches and stretches on the arms and legs.

When scrubbing through the animation, I noticed that the elbow and knee controllers would seemingly break with certain movements. With certain keys, any adjustments to the elbow or knee controllers would not change the clipping geo. This was ultimately compensated with adjusting related controllers (hand, hip, foot and toe). This ended creating a chain of clipped geo with movements after the fixed one, which led to more meticulous adjusting afterwards. I would say that this took a good chunk of my time this week.

Last week, the recovering pose was the roughest out of my first pass. I wanted to have the back have a drag upwards to the neutral pose. My first few attempts focused on using the IK hip, torso, and chest controllers to make pose. Despite trying to work with these controllers as I have with other keyframes, the back would look too stiff and unnatural.

I moved on to using the IK/FK blend instead to get a better shape. This allowed me to better manipulate the shape of the back, creating a more natural and smoother curve. After using this method, I went back to the pose on the jump's apex to further define the curve of the back again. 

I also spent some time adding some holding and adjusting the timing. This helped the readability of the poses, especially those in mid-air. The new timing still needs some work, as it feels to slow and doesn't really sell the clawing strike. This is something I will be working on this week.

Additionally, I want to some props in the back and a possible attacker to create a story and build up to the attack. This will help create a reason for the animation as well as provide a target for the strike.