Week 3

This lesson we learnt how to do animation. We did an short animation on Spiderman where he move slightly from left to right. It might sound easy but it is not as easy as it seems.

The feeling that we have to deliver is, Spiderman is walking leisure and suddenly he turned alert as he heard something coming from the right side. One of the important key point we have to take note is the weight movement. For the start, Spiderman has to appear to be relaxed so the body cannot be too stiff and at the end, Spiderman have to look alert which the body can look a little stiff.

First, I arranged the relaxed pose of Spiderman and set the first keyframe (1). To set a keyframe, select the whole Spiderman and key in 'S', the values will all turn red and a red line will appear in the keyframe 1.

In the first pose, Spiderman is looking at his left and his right foot is the main support for his weight. So, the hips is moved toward the right and the left side of the shoulder is rotate forward. The body is also rotate slightly downward so that Spiderman will not seems to be standing straight which will appear to be stiff. The head will turn to the left and rotate slightly down. The hands are the hardest to position for this pose as I have to keep adjust it by moving up, pulling it in and moving down so that it can look natural straight and move it nearer to the body.

For the last pose, it is similar to the first pose just that the body move to the right and the body have to be rotate back to straight so that it can seems to look like Spiderman had turned alert. The head is also rotate backward to seems that he turn his direct to something. The fingers also have to change the values so that Spiderman is clutching his fist.

I am quite amazed by how a small movement (rotating/moving) can change the feel of the model (from relaxed to alerted). Overall, this exercise is quite interesting and I learnt a lot from it.