Animation
13/05/24
I had a bit of difficulty controlling the limbs when I started animating, I wasn’t sure which bones I had to use rotate or transform to move them around so I ended up with a lot of contorted limbs at first.
For my character, I wanted to show her last bit of sanity left. My plan was to have her fall off her display box when her strings break and slowly crawl towards the camera, reaching her arm out for help.
For her start pose, I needed her arms up to the side as if the strings were connected to her arm.
It was very difficult to adjust the arm with inverse kinematics as it kept rotating in ways I didn’t want it to so I removed it for the arms.
It took a while to get used to moving the body around and animating but once I got used to it, it was actually quite easy. I set up a camera as a POV shot, and to make sure she was always in view, I would go between viewport and camera view to check and make any adjustments. When I was making camera adjustments, I would have camera to view on
It took a bit of trial and error to animate the crawl; I had to make sure that when I brought the arms backwards, it would still stay on the same level so it looked like it was on the ground. Once the arms were posed right, I moved the whole body forward, making sure the hand that moved back would be at the same position as before.
Once I got the full crawl, I realised the speed looked a bit unnatural and needed a short pause between each crawl. It took a while for me to figure out that I couldn’t just move the keyframes back, as they would just continue to move. I would keep forgetting to add keyframes for pauses, which meant I had to redo some animations multiple times.
I made a simple environment for my character so I could set up the camera and lights and also plan the rest of my animation.
Once I was happy, I rendered a second trial to see how it would look with the environment.