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This week, I changed the blocking animation to spline animation. The most serious problem is the lip shape. I am not very accurate in many details. Mr. George gave me very detailed feedback on each frame. I will modify the lip shape little by little according to this feedback. In addition, I need to pay attention to the body movements and the problem of the character’s hand penetrating the model. This is my first time to make an acting animation. The feedback in each class is very helpful to me. After following these steps and correcting the current deficiencies, I found that my animation has improved significantly. This makes me very happy.

Here are the areas I will improve on this week:

Lip shape and body movement details:
Continue to strengthen the adjustment of the character’s lip shape and body movement to ensure that each frame can accurately express the character’s emotions and lines. Pay special attention to the problem of the character’s hand movement through the model to ensure smooth and natural movements.

Pay attention to the character’s eyes and facial expressions:
In addition to the lip shape, pay attention to the details of the character’s eyes and facial expressions, which can enhance the character’s emotional expression and image shaping.

Character emotion and action consistency:
Ensure that the character’s emotions remain consistent throughout the animation process, making the character’s performance more realistic and fascinating.

Enrich the scene and background details:
During the polishing stage, you can consider enriching the details of the scene and background, such as light and shadow effects, props, etc., to increase the overall layering and visual appeal of the picture.

Adding sound effects and music:
Consider adding appropriate sound effects and music to the animation to enhance the atmosphere and emotional expression, making the entire work more vivid and interesting.

Ending rendering and output:
Finally, when rendering and outputting the animation, ensure the clarity and smoothness of the picture to present the best visual effect.

Add details to the thinking eyes:
Before the lines start, make sure the character’s eyes show concentration and thinking about the flying insect (or other object). This can be achieved through small movements of the eyes and the setting of the gaze point, making the character look more focused and natural.

Adjust the speed of the action to avoid the feeling of being too slow:
Re-adjust the speed of the character’s action when saying the first line, making sure it is faster to avoid the overall action appearing slow. This can maintain the character’s expressiveness and emotional coherence.

Add details to the finger movements:
Add more details to the character’s finger movements, such as the separation of fingers and appropriate bending, to make the hand movements more vivid and natural. This can avoid the hand movements from appearing stiff and increase the character’s expressiveness.

Streamline the movements and avoid deliberate feelings:
Consider removing the action of slapping the table to avoid giving the audience the impression of being deliberate. Simplifying the movements can make the character’s performance more natural and realistic.

Solve the problem of symmetrical movements of both hands:
Ensure that the character’s two-handed movements are not completely symmetrical, and create more flexible and natural hand movements through misaligned keyframes. This helps to enhance the realism and vividness of the character’s movements.

Polishing the lip performance:
Continuously polish the character’s lip performance in the later stage to ensure the synchronization and smoothness of the lines and mouth movements. This requires patience and meticulous work, but can significantly improve the performance of the character.

Strengthen the dynamic performance of the final key lines:
Emphasis on the character’s extreme tension when saying “about”, ensuring that it reaches the maximum extent and forms an exaggerated dynamic curve. This can highlight the importance of the lines and the expressiveness of the character.

Detailed explanation of animation adjustment feedback

This week, I shot a reference video and made a preliminary action breakdown (blocking) using the character model. After receiving feedback, I summarized the following points for improvement:

Add eye movements to show thinking state:
Before the action starts, you need to add some subtle movements to the character’s eyes to make it look like it is thinking. This not only enriches the character’s emotional expression, but also makes it easier for the audience to understand the character’s inner activities. In addition, the placement of the hands needs to be adjusted to make the character’s posture more clear and natural.

Adjust posture to make the movement more stretched:
By adjusting the character’s posture, make his movements appear smoother and stretched. This can enhance the character’s dynamic expression and make it look more vivid and natural.

Optimize the eye movement when looking up:
When the character looks up, you must ensure that the eyelids do not cover more than 1/2 of the pupil. This keeps the character’s gaze clear and visible and conveys more emotions. In addition, when looking up, keep some mouth shape changes appropriately and show teeth to enhance the realism of the expression.

Reduce action repetition and increase action diversity:
In the preliminary blocking, there are two actions where the characters point their fingers at each other, which seems a bit repetitive and monotonous. Therefore, the first pointing action can be changed to placing the hand on the table to increase the diversity and layering of the action.

Synchronize the movement of the eyelids and eyebrows:
The movement of the eyelids needs to be synchronized with the movement of the eyebrows. When the eyebrows are raised or pressed down, the eyelids should make corresponding pulling movements. This kind of detail processing can make the character’s expression more coherent and natural.

Avoid overlapping movements of both hands and stagger keyframes:
This is a problem I have always had, that is, the movements of the two hands are often too synchronized and overlapping. To improve this, the keyframes of both hands need to be staggered to create a sequence, even if their movement trajectories are the same. This can prevent the character’s movements from looking mechanical and increase the flexibility and naturalness of the movements.

This week, we need to create a performance animation with a close-up shot. This is my first attempt at a performance animation, so I need to pay special attention to details. We need to choose a suitable clip from a 3- to 7-second dialogue and carefully analyze the emotional state of the character based on this dialogue. Based on the character’s emotions, we will develop corresponding actions and draw a detailed action plan.

In this process, we must deeply understand the emotions contained in the character’s lines and think about how these emotions affect the character’s body movements and facial expressions. Every tiny movement and expression change of the character should reflect their inner emotional fluctuations and convey real and deep emotions.

In addition, when making performance animations, we need to constantly consider the audience’s feelings. Our goal is to allow the audience to resonate with the character and feel the character’s inner world. Therefore, we should focus on the following three keywords: clarity, sincerity and simplicity.

Clarity means that the character’s actions and expressions should be clear and easy to understand, and can intuitively convey their emotions. Sincerity requires that the character’s performance should be authentic and unpretentious, so that the audience can feel the natural expression of emotions. Simplicity means avoiding overly complex and redundant movements that distract the audience, keeping the movements and expressions concise and clear, and highlighting the core of the emotions.

By following these principles, we hope to create a performance animation that is both emotional and visually impactful, so that the audience can be deeply moved by the character’s story and emotions.

This is the line I chose. The instructor mentioned that when choosing lines, it is best not to choose lines from cartoons. Because this will affect the animator’s thinking when making it, because it is an existing animation. The animation I chose is from Nemo. A group of small fish saw a ship and discussed what it was. So I changed the setting and gave this line to an alien boy. I want to use the image of a little boy to make this animation.

His emotions change from the confidence of saying I know what it is to the confusion of thinking about what it is, and finally to the excitement of remembering it.

Based on last week’s feedback, this week I further optimized and improved the previous animations. Specifically, I need to increase the details of the hands to make the movements more vivid and realistic. First, I noticed that the five fingers have been keeping the palm open in the previous animation, which seems a bit stiff and unnatural. Therefore, I will adjust the posture of each finger to ensure that they can bend and change flexibly during the movement. In addition, the fingertips also need to follow the overall motion trajectory for subtle adjustments so that they can naturally reflect every movement of the character. This will not only increase the layering of the animation, but also make the character’s hand performance closer to reality.

This week’s task is to convert the previous blocking animation into a spline curve. The instructor used a classmate’s homework to make a demonstration, and I followed the following steps based on this:

-First check the root’s motion trajectory. I opened the root’s motion trajectory curve and started adjusting from the side view, then switched to the front view, adjusted the center of gravity, and finally checked the overall motion trajectory from the top.

-If some joints have abnormal rotation or jitter, you can turn on the filter in the curve editor. This can automatically filter out some problematic keyframes to ensure smooth motion.

-It is important to note that the movement of all joints and controllers should follow an arc trajectory to ensure the natural and smooth movement.

-During the adjustment process, you can select the large controller on the ground and hide the other parts to more clearly observe and correct the part you want to improve and eliminate unnecessary interference.

-When adjusting the foot movement, the motion curve of each foot should be observed from the side and front respectively. According to the reference material, there should also be corresponding rotation at the ankle.

-A small tip: a shortcut to copy and paste keyframes. First, select the number of frames you want to copy, click the middle mouse button, then place the mouse where you want to paste, press the middle mouse button again, and finally press the S key on the keyboard. This way you can quickly paste the desired keyframes.

Feedback

The upper body of the character needs to follow the movement from the root, so the movement of the head needs to be controlled so that it can rotate. Similarly, the hands also need to add follow-up movements to ensure that the movement of the entire upper body is more natural and smooth. When retouching, we need to pay special attention to these parts to ensure that their movement is coordinated with the overall movement. This can make the character’s movements look more realistic and vivid, improving the quality of the overall animation.

This week, I made some adjustments to the blocking in the last homework, mainly based on the teacher’s feedback. The following are detailed suggestions and thoughts for improvement:

First, when the character is about to start running, a preparatory action of stepping back needs to be added. This change can better reflect the character’s momentum accumulation and make the starting action look more natural and powerful. The addition of this preparatory action can enhance the character’s expressiveness and the audience’s sense of substitution.

Second, because I changed the camera angle from the front side to the 3/4 side view, the character’s movements can be more clearly seen. However, this also brought some new problems, such as the character’s posture is not clear enough on the keyframe. For example, the arm behind is blocked by the body, making the movement unclear. To solve this problem, I need to raise the arm behind higher to make the posture look more stretched and clear. In addition, in some keyframes, the positions of the two arms overlap, making it difficult to distinguish the front and back arms. Therefore, I need to adjust the position of the arms and separate them to ensure that each action is clearly visible.

Third, when the character jumps, because it requires a lot of strength, I need to make the preparatory action of squatting bigger and more exaggerated. This can better convey the process of the character’s accumulation of strength, making the take-off action more vivid and powerful, and also increase the expressiveness and viewing of the animation.

Fourth, the character’s arms need to make an arc movement following the body’s movement when landing, just like the tail animation in the ball bouncing we did before. In this way, the smoothness and naturalness of the character’s movements can be increased, making the entire movement more in line with the laws of physics and the audience’s expectations.

Finally, when the character finally lands, the arc of the pelvis position presents a triangle. However, in general, the arc of the character’s movement should be circular. Therefore, I need to adjust this part of the action and change the trajectory of the pelvis to a circular shape to make the character’s movement smoother and more natural.

Feedback:

This week we made a blocking assignment for the reference video. First, I set the keyframes for the animation. On these keyframes, I need to pay special attention to the angle and camera position. The character’s movements must be clearly visible, such as the movement of the arm, and there should be no overlap or blur on these keyframes to ensure that the character’s outline is clear and the audience can accurately grasp the character’s movements .

The second point is about the performance of the preparatory action, which should be more exaggerated to highlight the dynamic curves and movement changes of the character. By strengthening the performance of the preparatory action, we can make the character’s movements more vivid and powerful, thereby attracting the audience’s attention and conveying richer emotions and information. This exaggerated expression method helps to increase the fun and expressiveness of the animation, making the character’s movements more vivid and three-dimensional.

Next, I will polish these keyframes to further enhance their visual effects and expressiveness. By fine-tuning the details of each keyframe, the character’s movements are smoother and more natural, while maintaining clear and visible characteristics.