Week 10

Dr. Kennedy's feedback for the face performance:

Dr. Kennedy’s feedback was pretty much in line with the self-critique I already had in mind. Still, it was reassuring to see the feedback, which definitely took some stress off my shoulders. The biggest issue is the jitteriness and random movements in the eyes, so that’s going to be my first priority during the cleanup process. But this week, I would like to focus on finishing the body performance cleanup first.

Refining the feet:

While further refining the feet, I do experience the feet ik exceeding the maximum distance from the hip, resulting in the foot ik being dragged upwards as the hips push upwards.

Fixed the issue by using an animation layer to lower the hip position when it was dragging the feet ik upwards.

Foot turning often requires manually adjusting frame by frame, not really a fast approach to this.

Finger animations:

Some of the finger movement was really unclear in the reference footage. Scaling up the footage in Premiere didn't help as much as expected.

I separated the left and right fingers into different animation layers and focused on getting the finger poses as close to the reference footage as possible before refining the timing. The result was... acceptable at best. Some poses didn’t make much sense, the ending pose, in particular, feels really awkward and doesn’t fit the scene at all.

I think I’ll move on to fixing the arm positions first, then come back to further refine the fingers afterward.

Fixing the arms:

The arms were also separated into 2 animation layers for left and right, each containing the shoulder, elbow, and hand controller. Mainly adjusting the rotation of the shoulder controllers to keep the hands from colliding. The elbow angle was mostly correct when double-checking the reference footage. So minimum work needed to be done for them. 

After all that, I moved on to fixing the hand rotation to further refine their positioning. There were about 5 instances where the hands were really close to each other/touching each other. To help with this, I thought I should reenact the performance as much as I could based on the reference footage. This did give me a better understanding of the movement and how to approach animating it.

It definitely looks better after fixing the arm and hand rotation. Though some parts are still a bit weird. Most of them being when both hands were seemingly interacting with each other.

Body performance cleaned up

Reflection: 

I think the body performance was just barely acceptable to me, so I’ll take it to Dr. Kennedy next week to get his thoughts on what could be improved. The actual animating part wasn’t too difficult. The real challenge was breaking down and reenacting the movement before animating. I felt pretty lost when the reference footage wasn’t clear about the movement and poses. Reenacting it myself helped clear things up a bit, but something still feels off when I look at the outcome. This just goes to show how important CLEAR references are for animation, most of the time it’s really hard to imagine the movement just in the head.