Robot Animation

During this project we were to work in passes.  The first pass was to set the key poses and give it a rough timing.  You will notice that there is no fluidity between the poses and the character pops in and out between them.  This is one of the most crucial phases of the animation because here you are giving yourself something to work with, and in later passes you will work out the slow-ins and slow-outs but the main timing (and exaggeration to a certain degree) is already established.



For the second pass the keys are changed so they look smooth.  There is no difference in the timing and every pose is evenly inbetween-ed.  This makes it so the animation looks blend and boring, because there really is no difference in how fast poses are established.  But this evenness does make it easy to break up and create the more natural slow-ins and slow-outs.  The breakdown poses were also added in this stage.



During the third pass we created the more dynamic poses and established a much better sense of natural motion.  No new poses were added in this phase, and only tweaking was done to the already existing ones.  Also in this stage I cleaned my animation curves and made sure nothing felt out of place.


And lastly this is the final product.  The camera cuts are in place, and all the poses have been cleaned.  It turned out to be right under 500 frames (the limit for this project) and even though it might not seem like a lot of time, it does change the perspective when you realize that all of those 500 were hand placed and tweaked many times over.



Throughout the month I was constantly asking for critiques, because it is incredible to see how easily we get used to animation and imperfections become literally invisible to our eyes.  Even though I've never had a passion for animating, I found myself really enjoying the process.