Character Poses [Character Performance - Unit 01]

Character Poses

31/05/24

Introduction

Here we are at the start of the second module focusing on Character performance! I feel I have already pushed my animation skills quite far and I’m keen to develop them further focusing on quality human character performance animation. Since my undergraduate degree I’ve worked in Games and focused heavily on creating loops which I became very good at, however, I haven’t had as much experience in creating animation sequences for humans other than working on mocap driven cinematic sequences. So I’m really excited to challenge myself to create some high quality character performance. 

I have some lofty goals I’d like to achieve - I want to reach near to professional style animation that which would be seen in an animated film by Pixar, Dreamworks, Illumination etc. I admire the work of animators who enter the 11seconds club and hope to develop my skills and reach outcomes as close to these goals as possible. I hope to develop my pipeline and process for tackling such large tasks through critical ideas development, research, thumbnailing and acting. These preproduction activities I have tended to spend less time on and I feel my work is much stronger when I explore these. Furthermore, I hope to develop my understanding of posing, weight distribution and transfer, timing, blocking to splining processes and facial animation.

This first unit focusses on introducing the concepts of posing and will allow me to focus on purely posing characters to convey their inner feelings and emotions through their body language without needing to worry about the actual animation and timing itself. I feel this is an extremely good place to start and through my recent reading of Timing for Animation (Whitaker & Halas, 1990), Character Animation Crash Course (Goldberg, 2015) and Cartoon Animation (Blair, 2020), these have focused on creating strong poses that tell a story. Although these books focus on 2d animation you can see how the concepts of posing to tell a story are completely identical. If I can focus on creating strong key poses, extremes and breakdowns then I am going to make my animation much stronger in the long run. I genuinely feel one of my weaknesses in the past has been that I’ve allowed Maya to do too much work on the inbetweening process for me. Therefore, I’m hoping to improve my use of posing and understanding of these core elements of poses to help tell a story.

Project Management

We start again with organisation - this is such an important part of the process for me to break down tasks and understand where they slot into my week. I’m keen to get as much out of this course as possible, however, it is challenging studying and working alongside. Breaking tasks down helps me visualise what needs to be done and then I can estimate how long they will take and when they can be done. This will be particularly important across this period as I have a period of freelance work commitments alongside my regular job and studying this course. Furthermore, I’m still in recovery from my shoulder injury and attending hospital regularly. Whilst this seems slightly mad as I’m writing it down I am confident I will be able to allocate sufficient time to engage with all aspects.

This first unit actually feels fairly large with a whole host of tasks! I’ve broken it down into simple chunks and allocated a specific amount of time for each. The task at the end, animation of a character portraying an emotion, was a little ambiguous and potentially could balloon to being large so I will need to manage the scope of this task. 

Posing Exercises - The Flour Sack

This is an absolutely stellar exercise that focusses on getting emotional poses into a simple sack of flour. The challenge here is that you are working with elements similar but quite different to a human - we have no head or face and limited ‘limbs’ with the tassels on the bag. Ever since the beginning of this course I really wanted to explore a back to basics approach to strengthen my foundation of skills and knowledge so I was excited to focus in on this task and pose this abstract character in a range of different poses to reflect feeling and emotion.

The JD Flour sack rig (Daniels, no date, a) has been a solid rig for years with a range of controls that allows for a lot of deformation in the construction of different poses. I grabbed this from the author’s Gumroad page and tested in my current version of Maya to ensure that it ran smoothly and the textures displayed. I actually converted the materials to Arnold Materials so that when I was posing the Flour sack I could create some renders with lighting to showcase the poses well. I used a simple HDR map plugged into the Arnold Skydome light to get some default daytime lighting that looked good with minimal efforts.

Whilst this was just a short exercise I wanted to exercise my goals and root the concepts of these poses in some initial research. I find that often when we imagine stuff we can miss imagine elements and this can lead to awkward, unrealistic poses even if the concept of the pose is rooted in a good idea. Furthermore, I also wanted to act these poses out to show how I was using research to inspire the poses. Now I am not a sack of flour, however, I feel this doesn’t always matter as it allows you to explore the concept of the pose and understand how it could work in reality. You are then applying as many elements from the acted out pose you have photographed to the digital puppet you are working with. Whilst you might not include all of them the ones you do include will then help make your posing more realistic and engaging - at least thats the theory!

Pose 01 - Happy

Starting off with happy I looked for a cheering, positive and generally happy pose. I quickly came across Nintendo’s Mario (StickPNG, no date) and found this image which I felt was perfect! I loved the exaggerated jumping in the air idea as it was an extreme pose that exuded happiness. I also loved how it wasn’t symmetrical so it should make for an interesting pose - I’d be able to use the tassels of the flour sack as arms and shape the body into a twisted cheering pose!

Using this pose as inspiration I acted it out. This was pretty tricky with the limited motion in my left arm - you can see its slightly lower down that I would have liked. However, it was good to embody the pose and understand how the character might be angled. I’m tilting slightly backward with my weight on my right leg. I’m also rotated slightly to my right to prevent the pose being too stiff. I also have a kink in each arm and the left leg to improve the silhouette. I realise looking back at this now wearing all black isn’t the best for understanding the reference completely. I also have a fairly cluttered room at the moment, clearing this space would help future reference capture. None-the-less, I feel this is an important part of the process to understand and execute the pose I am trying to achieve.

Below shows the outcome of my posing with the flour sack! I’ve tried to maintain the curves in the pose so that we have a large ‘C’ shaped curve on the left of the image and a smaller one on the right to help with the directional flow of the motion. I’m reflecting the upward stretch of the left hand tassel and echoing this on the left foot tassel. I’m also kicking the right foot tall out to continue the arc on the right hand side of the flour sack whilst also conveying some motion in this jump. The right hand tassel looks okay as it curves downward slightly, however, looking and reflecting on it now this is my least favorite part of the pose. I could have maybe lowered the corner slightly to create a more extreme downward angle on the top of the flower sack and had this right hand tassel reflect mirror the right foot tassel for a bit more interest in the pose.

Pose 02 - Sad

Straight into pose 2, I actually wanted this exercise to be fairly snappy from research to acting to posing - to really loosen up my skills and stress test my posing with this more simplistic rig. I quickly found this deflated sad pose (pxhere, 2017) - again fairly extreme to really emphasise the feeling and keep in line with the posing style of the happy pose. I loved the curled up a recoiled nature of this pose that really shows they are trying to protect themselves. We also see no face at all yet can clearly tell this poor chap isn’t very happy, which is very poignant as my flour sack also has no face therefore I could hope to convey similar emotion. What I might struggle with is the length of the arms on the flour sack to create such a recoiled pose, however, I’m hoping that I will be able to suggest this kind of pose to replicate a similar emotion.

I also look a little look at Eeyore from the Whinnie the Pooh series as a stereotypically sad character. I found this image (GETWALLPAPERS, no date) which shows a similarly deflated look to the character, showing that all parts of the body are drooping downwards. I feel this is going to be particularly key for the flour sack to help convey sadness through this droopy slumped kind of posing.

This was actually one of the poses I found most difficult to emulate. Partly through the setup in my room and partly through getting a pose I was happy with. I was using a webcam on top of my monitor for ease - whilst good and quick to snap poses without the need for transferring from the device to my computer, in future I will use my GoPro and Tripod to help capture footage in a better space. I went through an array of ideas and iterations of the sad pose to explore what it could look like whilst I was trying to imagine how it would be for me to pose the flour sack in this pose. Below shows my experimentation with these variations.

Firstly I tried the closed, protected sad pose, however, I was really struggling to do this pose safely with my injured arm. I did it on my chair with the back supporting me, however, this was super awkward and wasn’t coming through well. I could have done it on the floor but I felt like I might be too far from the camera. I also felt this pose would be super hard to replicate with the flour sack as there are no knees and the arms are super short! This would make it difficult to get the same feeling across.

Next I tried a sort of crossed arms/supported face pose. I’d aimed for a crossed arms pose but I couldn’t do this comfortably with my injured arm so it sort of morphed into this. This would be difficult to pose the flour sack in again due to the range of motion and I also feel it looks closer to deep in thought opposed to sadness. Perhaps thinking through a tough concept but not quite hitting the mark I wanted for the pose.

Next I opted for a slumped pose next to channel the Eeyore droopy sadness. I actually really liked this concept and felt it would be achievable with the flour sack rig, however, I felt this was a little subtle and I wanted to exaggerate it further so I thought I’d try to reshoot this one.

This next image shows a very exaggerated version of this pose concept - a little too far I think this time. It kind of looks like I’m a machine that is been turned off. This is a perfect example of whilst exaggeration is good you still need moderation. I also didn’t like the side angle and felt the three quarter version worked a lot better. The above pose has more of the sadness I wanted but the below one was too much so I thought I’d try a middle-ground versions to try and meet in the middle.

This next image shows me pushing the pose a little more than the first version of this pose but not as much as the second version. I was really happy with this! There is more asymmetry in this pose through using the three-quarter angle and hanging y right arm a little further forward. I should be able to replicate this in the flour sack through the posing of the hand tassels in a similarly offset asymmetrical fashion.

Now that I was happy with the reference I used it to pose my character. I squashed it down into a slumped, droopy pose to match the Eeyore-like sadness and created the asymmetrical hanging of the hand tassels to match my reference. I curled the hand tassels downwards too to accentuate the droopy-ness and captured the angle from a three quarter camera angle to improve the silhouette. I also used the lighting to improve the staging by rotating the light to be positioned behind the character so that it lays shadow across the front of the character and the cast shadow also falls in front. I felt this really helped add to the overall emotion of the shot to improve and exaggerate the sad feeling. Looking at the shot now I’m not as happy with the feet tassels as they are posed more in a standing position and I feel they look a little too rigid. I could have tweaked these to look equally deflated and floppy as if the character was sat slumped down. This would have improved he sadness of the pose a little more to make all aspects of the character look droopy and sad!

Pose 03 - Angry

The next pose was angry and I started by thinking of a stereotypically angry character. This took me to Phil from Hercules who has an incredibly short temper and hard shell to crack. I found the below image (QuotesGram, 2017) which showed Phil in an incredibly irritated pose with a huge frown on his face and arms on his hips. Whilst I love this pose as a representation of anger I didn’t think it would work very well with the flour sack rig as the arms weren’t quite as dexterous as a humanoid based character and the flour sack is faceless. 

I found some stock imagery of angry people which was surprisingly useful for looking at stereotypically angry poses. I came across the below image (ClipArtMag, no date) which I felt was useful. I liked the forward, open and aggressive pose of this person. I could take a lot of inspiration from the forward imposing body action. The open arms would be more difficult to pose - what really works in the pose below is the bent, tensed arms with scary looking finger poses. These were all elements that wouldn’t carry through to the flour sack rig.

I also came across this next image below (DivorcedGirlSmiling, no date) which showed an angry frustration. I thought this was also a great pose and potentially might work for the flour sack as I could tilt the tassels towards the head area to create something similar. However, I really did like the imposing body pose of the previous image, however, combining the two could be a little odd as they are really expressing two different versions of anger for different purposes.

I started to explore acting out some of these poses to see what I could create. I started with the hands on the hips and this really did not work for me with the limited movement in my injured left arm - I couldn’t get my elbow out! As such this pose didn’t really work and I couldn’t embody the feeling I wanted to.

Next I tried a bit of a blend of the second and third research images. I incorporated an arched body and arms out. I feel the silhouette of this is pretty good with my shoulders and hips offset, however, I feel I’d have difficulty getting the same feeling with the flour sack where the arms are smaller and it would be more difficult to make fists.

Whilst fists would be more difficult to create I could represent a finger pointing - which can be quite aggressive. I tried out this pose below which I was really happy with. I loved the imposing forward nature of the body; the tilt on the shoulders and hips and the arm out in an aggressive pose. I could imagine this working well with the flour sack rig as I’d be able to take direct inspiration and pose the character similarly.

This was the outcome, which seemed to work pretty well! It was fairly challenging to pose the character in this way without the rig and skinning deforming abnormally, however, I feel I found a good balance. I really like the forward and imposing pose of the body achieved through stretching the left side foot tassel backwards and holding the weight of the flour sack on the other. I like the smooth curve running up the left side of the body that extends to the curled hand tassel which looks appealing to the eye. I also like how the main ‘weight’ of the body is pushed into the chest - as if the character is really puffing out to express dominance. The lean forwards pointing works well as if the flour sack is blaming someone else for something which leads the narrative and storytelling element of this pose particularly well. I’ve stretched out the upper corner a little and the deformation is a little odd - I actually wanted to push this further but the squash and stretch didn’t feel believable so this was a happy medium!

Pose 04 - Laughing

A super fun one to approach - plenty of room for exaggeration and experimentation with more wild poses. I wanting to keep in line with the exaggerated posing that I explored previously and felt like a ‘rolling on the floor laughing’ pose would work well. I found the below pose of Donald Duck laughing (Dreamontoyz.com, no date) and absolutely loved how the laughter completely consumed the full pose - this would also be incredibly fun to act out! I did slightly worry about how I would achieve this with my injured arm, however, perhaps I could curl the arm across my stomach to look as if I was really trying to control the incontrollable laughter.

I came across the video below (Rolling On The Floor Laughing, 2014) and have screenshotted the particular pose I like. This is similar to the Donald Duck laughing pose above, however, has further asymmetry to it. I like how one leg is much higher than the other and rotated slightly differently. The arms are equally offset and asymmetrical from one another which I feel works well and I’d like to incorporate into my pose.

The below photo is my first attempt and whilst I like the pose the actual set up of the shot is terrible. I’m wearing dark colours and they are overlaid onto an equally dark background making it difficult to fully understand the pose. This is absolutely a lesson in ensuring all aspects of the reference are setup in a way that is readable and useable.

This shot below fixes the issues from the above shot by removing the dark background. I’m super happy with this pose as reference because I’ve incorporated all elements from my research to achieve a pose that is undeniably showing laughter in an asymmetrical fashion. I’ve incorporated my injured arm across my chest as I discussed earlier to solve the issue I was having with holding it in a different position but also still executing the emotion of the pose I wanted.

The below image shows the outcome of my posing with the flour sack and I’m really happy with this! I wanted a little more exaggeration on the upper hand tassel, however, this looked really odd when I stretched the rig as it wasn’t holding the volume of the flour sack and lost its believability. I love how everything is asymmetrical including hand and feet tassels pointing in completely different directions. All of the hand and body tassels follow the curves of the body making it feel extremely organic and natural. I quite like the kink in the middle of the bod as it offers a divide between the belly/lower body and the chest/upper body which helps sell the feeling that the flour sack is curled up on the floor laughing. Overall a very successful pose that I was really happy with and utilised my research and acting well to create a strong pose!

Pose 05 - Crying

So this was a little bit of challenge initially as crying and sadness are heavily linked. I wanted to create something a little different, however, the limited range of motion of the flour sack was a limiting factor. I initially revisited the original idea of the slumped on the floor pose in a curled up and retreated pose. I found this image (The Princess in the Tower, 2024) showing a side on angle and wondered whether I could try and create a more seated and squashed sad pose.

Rather than sitting on the chair to attempt this pose I tried this one on the floor. Below is m first attempt which does look sad but something didn’t feel quite right about it. Whilst I am squashed down and retreated - the retreated aspect could be a lot more exaggerated.

This was my next attempt where I really tried to retreat into myself and this felt a lot stronger. The first kind of felt like I could just be sleeping or resting whereas these subtle changes to pull my body in closer felt like it strengthened the sadness in the pose. I was happy with this and thought I would give it a try with the flour sack. It would no doubt be challenging due to the limited dexterity but I wanted to see what I could achieve.

I achieved this outcome which looked good. The first key aspect of this pose that I wanted to make different from my sad pose was to make it look like it was sitting rather than standing. This has worked well and looks particularly strong in the silhouette from this angle. I love the bulge on the right hand side of the image and also how the lower and upper body are differentiated creating a more interesting silhouette. If you actually turn the camera the volume of the deformation on the skinning isn’t as strong and looks flatter - however, in this case it really doesn’t matter as the audience would not know this. This shows working with the limitations of the rig well and using the camera to help with the staging to improve the silhouette. The feet work well too as they feel a loose and floppy as if this character is really sad. The hand tassels were a challenge - I’ve gone for an asymmetrical pose with one hand drooped down and another holding in a tear. To help the silhouette slightly I rotate the light so that the shadow was on the front, however, caught both of the hand tassels so that they were readable and not lost in the body. This works well, however, it would be more readable in an animation that looped a little bit of motion to show the tears were really jerking out.

Pose 06 - Fearful

The last one in this exercise series! I really wanted this pose to reflect a cowering nature to show that the character was afraid of something bigger, scarier or more imposing than itself. I came across the image below (Kurhan, no date) which shows a cowering pose. I like how the body curls away but is also twisted slightly awkwardly to maintain some eye contact with the thing they fearful of. Another key aspect is the arms being up to protect the core aspects of the body.

I also came across this image (Full Sail Leadership, 2020) which was a little more extreme and from a side on angle. I think the side on angle works particularly well here as it allows the silhouette to read better. We have a lovely reversed ‘c’ shape curve as the line of motion away from the threat. A ‘c’ shape line of motion towards the body would also work as it is squashing he body together to protect the vital parts.

I tried out a few different poses, again I really struggled with this one due to the the limited range of motion in my injured arm at the moment. Firstly I tried a cower away from the threat. This worked okay but the closed in arms I feel might be a bit of a challenge to create with the flour sack’s range of motion. Similarly when things are more closed in they don’t always read as well in the silhouette or can become lost in the body - particularly when the same texture is applied across the rig.

This was my second attempt with my arms out. I don’t think my head position works well here - it’s a bit disconnected from the direction of the hands and imaginary threat. The hand poses are okay, however, overall it feels a little weak and not as interesting as it could be. The body in particular doesn’t feel as if it is cowering away from the threat.

This was my next attempt which I feel is significantly stronger! The curve in the line of motion on the body is much stronger, presenting a more appealing silhouette. The arms are more bent and arrange asymmetrically which creates a happy medium between a fully closed arm pose and an extended one. The head is turned away and downward which adds to the fear element by showing the character feels that danger is incredibly imminent and they can’t bear to look.

The below image shows my outcome of posing. I opted for a line of action in the body that curves towards the threat because it felt difficult to pose the arms in the way I wanted when the body was poses away as they are so short. I like how I’ve leaned all the weight on the back leg and the front leg is outward for balance. I also like how the right hand tassel is posed with a little flatness to it which kind of looks like a palm and reflects how I was posing my hands. The other hand tassel I struggled with because If I posed it anywhere else it looked like it was doesn’t a martial arts pose instead which wasn’t what I wanted. I opted to curl it inwards as if it was covering its face in fear. Overall this pose is okay, however, not my favorite! Due to the limitations of the rig I found it a little difficult to reach a solution and similar to the crying pose animation might have helped sell the pose a little better.

Poses - Talking on the Phone

In this next exercise I’m building on the previous exercise, however, focusing more on poses that tell a narrative. The exercise explores how to pose humanoid characters in a telephone scenario and analysing how their poses tell the story of subtext. Essentially meaning that our actions can speak louder than words. In dialogue situations it is not solely the lip and face actions that let us know how a character is feeling but actually a lot of this coming from the posing in the body.

I quickly came up with a short concept that I thought would work well and show a change in emotions and feeling over time. I wanted the main character to react to what as being said on the phone but also show a development in internal thought over time.

Concept : 

• Someone bored at work.
• Gets a phone call and is alerted to a problem, which causes them alarm/shock.
• The character processes the problem and becomes panicked/worried.
• They get an idea for how they could solve the problem, becoming enlightened.
• They then become angry/annoyed that it is a silly idea and won’t solve the problem.
• They then have a follow on 'crafty/cunning' thought for how to their initial solution idea work.

I thought that the body mechanics rigs (Daniels, no date, b)would be perfect for this task as they are actively faceless, therefore the success would be solely carried through the body posing. These are great simple rigs to work with that offer a lot of flexibility for stand humanoid posing. I’m going to use the Jack rig as it is the closest to my body type and I am planning to take a similar approach to the previous exercise of researching, acting out and posing.

Pose 01 - Bored

The initial starting state of my concept was bored. I found this image (Prostockstudio, no date) which I felt was a good starting point. I love the slightly slumped pose throughout the makes them look drained of energy. They have their hand holding their head up, a classic bored pose, which wouldn’t be exactly possible in my pose as they are going to be holding a phone to their ear. However, in a way this will actually be fairly similar as the hand will be in a similar position. 

This photo below shows me acting out the pose taking inspiration from above. I have a slumped pose with one shoulder tilted upwards and a slouch in my spine that shows a very bored looking pose. My head is tilted slightly down to also reflect boredom. I’m using a ‘pretend hand phone’ here and I actually thought this would work really well for the rig too as it would make it a little more silly and cartoon-like. I was happy that I could use this pose as a base for my animation so moved on to creating my first pose.

The image below shows the outcome of my posing that I’m really happy with. I feel it uses my research and acting out particularly well and makes some small modifications to make the pose read even better. I love how bored the character looks on their phone - like they really cannot be bothered with this phone conversation at all. The weight is on the character’s left leg which accentuated the slump which I really like. There is a nice ‘S’ shape in the line of action too which makes the pose appealing. The only thing I’m not as keen on is the left hand could have been rotated a little more to help it read a little better as it’s currently not as clear as it could be in the side on view.

Pose 02 - Shocked

Next we have the reaction to some key information. A lot of those tends to be shown in the face, however, I think I can make it work through body posing alone and contracted to the slumped, bored pose. I found this reference image (Koldunova, no date), which was okay. It’s a lot straighter and shows realisation which is good. I like the hand on the head but I don’t think this will work with my character as he is on the phone meaning I’d have to put his other hand on his head which will probably look like frustration. I wanted more of a cartoon-like straight and rigid body shock. Potentially even raised in the air slightly. I didn’t find any other research but felt I could combine my ideas with this image to get a good outcome when I act it out. 

This image below is the outcome of my acting. I really like this pose! We have a great diagonal line of action leaning to the left, a little bit of asymmetry with the left arm and leg out. The weight is securely on the right leg. Overall, I feel the silhouette is good and shows the emotion even without the facial pose. I was super happy with this and was ready to pose the character.

The image below shows the outcome of my posing. It’s almost identical to my reference, however, I’ve exaggerated it a little further. The exaggeration works well to add a little more interest to the silhouette, also I physically cannot get my left arm any higher and prefer the more raised pose of this. The weight of the character is securely on the right leg and rest of the body contrasts the previous pose to become more rigid in shock. Overall a good pose, I could have experimented a little further with the stiffness of the pose, however, I feel the slight bends in the arms, legs and body make the silhouette of the pose more interesting.

Pose 03 - Worried

The next pose in my concept was worried to show that the character has processed the information and is now concerned about it. I found the below image (Teacher Phill, no date)  which I think is real classic, pantomime style worried. The hands are to the face in a nail biting pose, I wouldn’t be able to do two hands as my character is on the phone, however, 1 would work just as well. This person is also slightly tilted to the side in a slightly offset fashion which also shows that they are not at ease. I felt like this was a good enough reference to experiment with acting out the pose myself as the idea of nail biting I thought would work particularly well for my concept.

Below are 3 different versions of the same idea. Firstly I tried to mimic the image on a side profile - partly to see what dexterity I could get with my injured arm and then to review the photo myself. The challenge I have is that the closed in pose doesn’t have the most interesting silhouette and I would prefer an elbow to be out, however, I don’t think I’m going to be able get my arm there.

Next I tried curling forward slightly to make the silhouette more interesting. I feel like this works pretty well as the ‘S’ shape in the line of action is more pronounced than the previous image. I still would prefer the elbow to be out, however, as I said I physically cannot get my arm there. I think when I start to develop my complex animations it would be worth me exploring thumbnailing to refine my poses a little more. Regardless, this is still good reference that I would be able to tweak when posing the character.

Finally I tried it from the opposite angle as I felt like the phone was lost and the pose became confused. I think I’ve rotated a little too much here and could have turned slightly more towards the camera, however, I do like the S shape better. I liked how the curved front right leg help accentuate the ‘s’ shape too making the silhouette of the full pose more interesting. The nail biting would be more readable if there was a little more twist in the upper body and the elbow out. 

The below image shows the outcome of my posing and I think it works really well. I do really like how the curved spine, bent left arm and bent left leg reads in the silhouette. The whole pose is a little closed in on itself which helps make this character look a little uneasy. The nail biting works really well to tell the audience that this character is undoubtedly worried. I’ve flipped the legs from the reference and I’m not entirely sure why, however, I my thought process was that the character would be leaning on the right leg so I thought it would be better if this one was squashed.

Pose 04 - Enlightened/Idea

Next I wanted the character to suddenly gain an idea for how to solve the problem that was communicated to them on the pose. I found it difficult to find exactly what I had in my minds eye, however, I came across this image (Best, 2017) which mostly encapsulated what I wanted. I wanted the character’s finger in the air as an ‘a ha!’ kind of moment and I wanted the character stretched out into the air. In this image you can see the finger raised albeit to the head, however, it gets the core point across. I also really like how straight and in line the rest of the body is. The head is tilted upwards as they are looking into the sky - the complete opposite of a negative emotion where a character would be looking downwards. The best thing to do now was to experiment with posing to help visualise my idea.

Below shows the best outcome I achieved for this idea and I think it works well! I struggled again with the dexterity of my injured arm, as I needed both hands up in the air which I just can’t do at the moment. The important part of this pose was the straight body, head up and arm up in a pointing pose. I feel this is well achieved, I like how the body leans backward slightly, however, I didn’t tilt my head back as my reference showed but I could correct this in Maya! I like how there are similarities between this pose and the shocked pose, however, this one is so much more positive looking, which really shows how we can show the emotion of a character through a few small changes.

Below shows my outcome of posing the character in Maya and I really like this one! The subtlety tilt backward with increasing amount of tilt as we get higher on the body helps making this pose look really positive. I love how I’ve kept the legs close together which really puts the focus on the top of the body and is an element of contrast - something I can struggle with as I tend to make everything extreme meaning I lose all contrast so I was happy with this. The tilted head reads very positive and hopeful with the raised finger in the air mimicking this positive. Overall a pose I am really happy with due to the strong silhouette that reads exceptionally well. If I were to improve it I think I might add some slight tilt in the shoulders to the screen right in the shoulders and head which would improve the line of action further.

Pose 05 - Defeated/Annoyed

The next pose in the series was to be defeated or annoyed with the idea they just had - the idea being that they think their idea won’t work. This was going to be a more subtle pose and needed to contrast the previous one. I found the below pose (kohanova1991, no date) that almost showed everything I was looking for - the head is tilted away and slightly down. The arms are crossed which, won’t work for my idea as the character is on the phone, however, I wanted to add a fist as if the character has punched the air downwards.

Next I looked more along the annoyed route and found this image (Catzovescu , no date). To be honest, this wasn’t really what I was looking for as it looked closer to anger or frustration which wasn’t quite the right level of emotion I was looking for. I wanted my annoyed pose to be relatively light hearted as the character was annoyed with themselves rather than someone else.

I created this pose which tried to mix the two. I like the looking away and twisted pose, however, the arms don’t really work at all. I should have tried to reshoot this a little more to act out the pose better as I knew I wanted that sorta downward punch added onto this. Again, posing for me and holding my arm in positions is super difficult and is limiting me.

Below shows the pose I created and it came out a lot better than al of my research and references! The pose of the hand punching down in annoyance accentuates the frustration in this pose whilst not being too exaggeratedly angry. I also how this hand improves the silhouette by sticking out slightly to make it a little more readable. The downward tilt on the chest and head shows more negative body language to show that things aren’t going quite so well for this character! The legs, hips and foot position do feel a little awkward as they are tilted towards screen right whereas the head and chest are twisting to screen left and I feel it would have looked more consistent if the curves in the body followed a similar rotation. Overall this pose worked well at balancing the extremities in this sequence of poses to create enough contrast to the previous and next poses.

Pose 06 - Crafty/Cunning

Finally we are at the punchline of this animation sequence - the crafty or cunning idea. This is meant to contrast the previous pose of annoyance and show that the character is thinking of a cunning way that they could make their idea work even if there might be some negative consequences. I found this image (Khosrork, no date) below that shows that crafty look on the face, however, also shows some crafting, insincere body language. You can see this through the slightly hunched over pose in the shoulder and head tilt and more importantly in the steepled fingers. Whilst I couldn’t steeple the hands together because I have one of the characters hands on the phone, I could, however, take a lot of elements for the pose itself.  

Here is my experimentation with acting out the post I wanted to create. What I’m trying to do here is create the hunched shoulders that give that element of craftiness - this is almost a slight thought of evil in the character in order to make the idea work. This comes through in the pose but I think the angle is all wrong and would be better tilted more to screen right. I’ve also tried to create a slightly creepy hand pose, almost mirroring the steeple, however, pointing to the sky similar to the enlightened pose. Overall I was happy with this concept and would experiment with the idea when posing the character in Maya.

Below shows the outcome of my posing and I’ve had some real fun trying to push this pose as far as I could! I’ve got a beautiful ‘s’ curve in the line of action in the body that feels natural and organic which works well. I’ve also managed to achieve that hunched over pose to trying and pull that crafty nature through. I’ve pushed the arm out to the side and in contrast to the enlightened pose I have the finger pointing upwards lower than the head which also helps add to the craftiness. Furthermore, I have a slightly awkward twist to the head which I feel adds a small touch of evil to the pose without over powering it. I’m super happy with this pose I feel I have taken my research, reference and general concept to create a strong pose that read well in the silhouette.

I also edited these images into a short video sequence as you might do with an animatic to get a feel for what this might look like as an animation .Although limited to the key poses I feel the concept of the idea is coming through well which is a key aspect of this stage of animating. It was really fun to focus purely on key poses and not worry too much about the actual animation - I’ve really wanted to take a back to basics approach with this masters degree and focus on polishing all aspects of my craft as an animator. My thinking was that If I can master and improve the quality of my animation pipeline it will improve the quality of my work as a whole. I feel this exercise is making good strides in the right direction with perfecting my skill particularly through my breakdown of research and acting out poses to inform my posing in Maya.

Project Management Mid-Unit Reflection

A small project management update before I progress onwards with this unit. There was a lot of ideas and tasks in this unit so I wanted to keep myself focused and systematically working through the tasks. This Trello card below shows my current progress having achieved the first two tasks which I explored very in depth as this blog post shows. The next big task is the head turn poses and then finally ending on the animation of the emotion. The animation of the emotion is a little ambiguous for how long it should be and what it should show, however, my loose thought is that it would be a small sequence possibly showing a change of emotion. Finally I would need to work on the blog post to present, narrate and reflect on my progress across my blog. I followed similar processes on my last module to keep myself on track and it worked well so I am hoping to repeat the process again for this module. The key to success was ensuring that each unit gets at least 1 week dedicated to it and that I ensure blog posts are presented consistently as I go to keep on top of work and reflect on it whist its fresh in my memory!

Tween Machine Experimentation

In one of the later lecturers I learnt about the Tween Machine add on for Maya by Barrett (2023). I’d actually heard about this for some time but never experimented with it or understood how to use it properly. I understood it was a way to develop blocking and blocking plus as part of the animation pipeline to help ensure that inbetweens and breakdown poses were controlled by the animator opposed to allowing Maya to create a spline-y mess. So I thought I’d give it a real quick experiment to see how it worked and what I could achieve before I used it as part of my full pipeline.

Tween Machine (Barrett, 2023) was really fun to use! I’d only spent around 10 minutes or so doing some loose animation with no polish, however, I feel this was going to help my animation sequence production pipeline significantly. I liked how you could apply the Tween Machine to the full character or selected controls because this would allow you to create overlapping action easily or at least start it before you refined this in the graph editor. I liked the amount of control you have in favoring particular poses meaning you can really ease in / ease out or snap into poses. This also helps with creating moving holds in animation to prevent things from feeling completely static.

Head Turn Exercise

01/06/24

The next exercise was focused on creating the poses required for a head turn. This is a super interesting exercise as there are a lot of nuances in our human reactions and the order in which our facial features and head react depending on what we are reacting to and how we are feeling.  So I was keen to get into this exercise and apply the same level of reference capture that I did on the previous tasks. I wanted to focus purely on acting and capturing my own reference to test my acting skills but also as a stress test of quickly iterating through poses in a host space of time.

I started with a quick concept for the scenario to help add a story and believability and purpose to the poses I was creating. The idea was :

• The character would start off looking bored off to the side
• They would then hear a noise which would make them alerted through a very slight shock.
• They would then turn their head to the other side of the screen curiously.
• They would react being unimpressed and not interested in the source of the noise.

Now that I had the loose context I thought I would dive right into acting to see how well my concept worked and how well I could act it out. Firstly I started off with the bored pose. I’ve sat close to the camera which is reflective of the mid shot camera angle I plan to use. I’ve deliberately looked off screen to screen left so that the character can turn to screen right across the course of the animation. I feel this pose works really well because the silhouette is clear and the facial expression reflects boredom with the slightly lowered brows, neutral mouth and head resting on the hand.

Next I wanted the character to hear the noise and become alerted and slightly startled. I’ve captured this through the shocked pose in the face - large open eyes and ‘o’ shaped mouth with the jaw slightly open. This elongates the pose of the face to add to the shocked effect of the body language. I’ve also pulled the hand the head was resting on off the face but kept rigid in shot to further add to the shocked. I’ve pulled myself more upright to further show that I’ve become alerted but also add to the arc of the motion in general. Finally I’ve kept my eyes to screen left because prior to hearing the noise I was looking in that direction so the character should maintain interest there for a short amount of time. Overall the pose felt good as it reflected the alerted / slightly shocked emotion I was aiming for and felt like it was leading the motion through the shot so I was happy to use this as reference.

Next we have another key pose in the animation where I looking towards the source of the noise with intrigue and slight hope. The facial expression here is good and shows how subtle movements really mark a difference. Here you can see that the slight open mouth, slightly upward corners of the mouth, slightly raised eyebrows and open eyes create a positive hopeful expression. I tend to push poses a bit too extreme sometimes so a challenge for me will be trying to replicate these subtleties in the rig. There are further positive accents to the pose shown through the body tilting slightly towards the source of the sound and the head tilted slightly up. Overall the pose is working well and is an excellent example of the small subtleties in posing to create nuanced poses - it was important that this pose wasn’t full on happy because the character hasn’t fully registered what the noise is yet therefore I am trying to create a hopeful gaze!

The final pose in this series was the acknowledgement of the source of the sound and the realisation that this wasn’t particularly interesting and definitely not worth the effort to look over. This pose is working really well and again I love the subtleties in the posing of the face but also how the whole body language exudes slight annoyance. The eyelids are heavier with less of the eyes showing and the pupils are looking downwards to show the negativity in the pose. The slight head tilt to screen right works well and contrasts the more upright alert nature of the previous pose. The lips are pushed together with slightly down turned corners of the mouth. 

Now that I’d explored the concept I needed to find a right to work with - this was a little more challenging than I first anticipated! I wanted a rig that I could familiarise myself with and use in the future. I also wanted a rig that had a range of facial controls that I could practice implementing the facial expressions I acted out in this concept series. I went through a whole array of rigs that I felt I could use and assessed their use-ability and complexity in their controls. I tried the ‘Aang rig’ (Pray et al., 2020) which was good, however, was extremely stretchy and I felt like this would be difficult to pose. I tried the Morpheus rig (Burton, 2010), however, couldn’t find the updated one that was Arnold ready and I didn’t want to use a rig that I couldn’t render properly. I found this Waitress rig (Calle, no date) and I felt this worked well and had good facial controls. I’d spent a lot of time looking for rigs and I felt I wanted to move forward and stress test this rig!

https://callesantiago.gumroad.com/l/waitress

This was the outcome that used my reference to help me create the key poses. It was really fun to explore the facial posing in addition to body posing this time. I found that even making the smallest movements had a big impact on the emotion they helped convey. Typically I tend to over exaggerate so in this exercise I was trying to achieve the more subtle nuances from my own reference. I really love the contrast between the bored pose and the shocked pose - there is a contrast in positioning and facial expression that shows the character has been startled. The hopefully pose works well but although my reference has the most open I don’t think it reads as well with this rig and perhaps closing it would have worked better as there’s a little too much teeth for my liking. I feel the hopeful pose could also have a little bit more of an arc in the back so that there is more of a curve to the spine to make the silhouette more appealing. The annoyed pose works but feels a little bit flat I think I could have arced the back forward more to counter the curve to the previous pose. 

Reflection On Animation Theory So Far

It’s been super good to explore these more ‘back to basics’ exercises and really try to work on my posing. This is an area I think I can still develop further and I’m sure this module will help me. The following points are the key things that I’ve learnt from the exercises and lectures so far :

• Body language, even without facial expression, tells us what the character is feeling or thinking.
• The process for getting a great pose : 
• Sketch / Act out and photograph
• Focus on achieving a good silhouette that reads well
• Set up camera at the beginning of the shot so you understand the angle your silhouette to read. This is different to games where animations need to read well from multiple angles.
• Asymmetry in posing opposed to symmetry to give poses more impact and stronger silhouettes.
• Pay attention to where the weight or centre of gravity of a character lies. This needs to be believable or your poses and motion will not.
• Consider how to make the posing interesting through conveying the appeal of the character’s personality. Different characters will respond and behave in different ways depending on their personality. Milt Karl being a strong example of an expert in this field through animating characters from the Jungle Book like Shere Khan.
• Consider adjusting the camera’s focal length or depth of field to draw focus to your character.
• When acting out an idea you will often need to act it out multiple times to understand how best to execute the idea which should lead to the strongest development. You are unlikely to nail this on the first take!
• Facial expressions can also have sub text meaning that even with the same dialogue line the body language and facial expression will show what the character is really feeling.
• We have genuine expressions which are more subtle and natural versus pantomime expressions which are much more exaggerated and more easily readable.
• There are nine core facial expressions that can be blended together for nuances and more complex concepts such as an evil laugh : 
• Neutral
• Disgust
• Contempt
• Anger
• Determination
• Happiness
• Sadness
• Surprise
• Fear
• Allow the audience to see the expression change through a still head and clear camera angle.
• The eyes are often called the window to the soul and like the body can also show a lot of emotion and tell us what the character is feeling. These eye poses and movements can sometimes carry the performance on their own.
• When the pupils move then the eyes should blink as part of the action.
• A light blink will be snappier versus heavier blink that will be held for longer.
• The average timing of a blink should be around 6 frames and the lids should be closed or close to closed for a couple of frames. 
• Blinks should also be faster into the down pose and slower on the way back up. 
• You can also offset each eye by one frame for more natural.
• When blinking the pupil can follow the eye lid on the blink down to help make the motion more natural.
• Eye darts are small subtle motions of the pupil to help keep things natural. Happen over a short amount of frames and stay put for a while. This helps the eyes feel more alive and less static, particularly for 3D!

This first unit has been fairly intense to far but its been good to really think about the core theory that will underpin this module. Below shows my Trello board that tracks my progress. I’ve separated out the last task of this unit as it asks me to create a short animation that shows an emotion which will hold its own production pipeline from preproduction to production. I’ve also then separated out the blog write up of this module to help me visualise the two tasks more clearly. 

I’ve made a task card for the final exercise in this unit to help structure the pipeline. My goal is to spend a full day on this exercise and then send to Alex Williams for feedback. I know that I need to develop my human character animation and posing so this feedback will be crucial to developing my skills and achieving my goals of reaching closer to professional looking character animation. 

Time is extremely challenging at the moment with physio appointments on my shoulder at the hospital each week and the frequent exercises I do at home paired with not being able to drive so I have significantly less time than I would have had previously. I’m prioritising practical work when at home and trying to make use of my commuting time to update my blog and I’m hoping that more units can be dropped at once to enable me to not be limited by the content on the virtual learning environment. If this happens then I can holistically plan my tasks on Trello stronger too because I can assess how long things will take - I could also make a production schedule too to further visualise this.

Emotion Exercise Introduction

The final exercise in this series was to create an animation showing an emotion. This was pretty ambiguous and due to the depth of theory explored and thinking about the quality of the showreel I wanted to create something small but high quality. My initial idea was to have a change from one emotion to another to help create the short animation. In hindsight, this was probably a little too much, however , I still feel I learnt a lot by doing this! 

Rig Acquisition

I really wasn’t too keen on the waitress rig because although the controls were good I did get some issues with the skin poking through the shirt that I didn’t like. I was looking for a rig that had good facial controls and a good balance of complexity and ease of use and something that I could use for the module. I decided to look at paid rigs that were affordable but hopefully higher quality and I came across the ‘Sam’ rig (Salas, no date), shown in the images below.

Before I parted ways with cash I wanted to watch a couple of reviews of the rig to help me understand. How the rig worked and what other professionals thought of the rig. I watched these two videos below by Jean-Denis Haas (Sam - Maya Animation Rig - Review, 2020) and Sir Wade Neistadt (Exploring NEW Animation Rigs: Sam & Amy, 2020) who were two YouTuber’s that I trusted for animation content due to their experience and quality of animation content. They gave me an overview of how the rig worked and both confirmed that they would recommend the rig, which was good! I felt like this would be a good purchase and would enable me to create animations without technical barriers. I’d already spent a lot of time looking for effective free rigs and this rig looked significantly better!

Below shows a shot of the controls for the character. There were a lot of visibility controls that allowed me to show and hide what I needed so that it wasn’t overwhelming and meant I could focus on the posing of the character itself. The facial controls were also similarly convenient to use with simple slides or more complex controls depending on the complexity you needed. After watching the videos above and playing around with the rig I was really happy with this character - it also helped that the model itself looked visually appealing and neutral too. 

Concept 

Now that I had an effective rig I wanted to come up with a quick concept that would show a change of emotion. My loose concept was to create something that was trying to be scary and then become scared themselves. I thought this could be good because it would be complete polar opposites in the emotion and allow for some interesting facial expressions. I developed a short treatment for the story that would follow these key events : 

• Character with their back facing to the camera.
• Slowly peers over shoulder looking slightly evil and mischievous.
• Quickly turns around to face the camera and snaps into a scary pose loop with creepy fingers.
• Something offscreen causes the character to become shocked.
• They then recoil into a retreated and scared pose.
• End.

Now that I had a clear concept that would give purpose to my poses I could dive into research gathering to inform my acting. I had broken the story down into key chunks which will directly link to key poses that I will aim to make as strong as possible through my acting. I feel already my posing is improving and I feel this is largely due to my preproduction pipeline, so I am keen to see what I can achieve for this short animation.

Research

Head Turn

Firstly I needed a starting pose for the character and in this scenario it was the relaxed head turn with the character’s back facing the camera. I thought this would contrast the next action where the character would leap forward and attempt to scare the audience. I found this small gif (A24, 2018) of a head turn which shows the head leading the body around to slowly see what is behind them. The character looks a little scared at this point, which isn’t what I’m going for but it was interesting to see this leading motion from the head.

Next I wanted to look for some static poses that I could use to inform and support my posing. I came across this image below (Drobot, 2016) which was strong all round! I loved the relaxed look to the body but also the serious look to the face, which was closer to the emotion I was going for in this key pose. It’s good to see how the left arm is relaxed with a slight bend at the elbow. There is also a slight bend to the hips with the rear leg slightly raising to aid the looking back action. 

Scary

The next key pose I had was the scaring pose and all I had in my head was Sully from Monsters Inc! I really wanted a thrusting forward pose with arms out and fingers curled forward as if you were really trying to scare someone. I found this gif (bjblujay, 2016), which was almost a moving hold of the pose I wanted. You can see the scary hands and the scary face to go with it really clearly! What you can’t really see is the posing of the body so I wanted to do a bit more research to see what I could find!

I came across the below video (Monsters Inc Sully's morning, 2017) which shows Sally’s classic scaring pose but from the side angle and full body in view. This makes it a lot easier to understand and whilst using animation reference isn’t always the best this will inform my acting which I can then use as reference.

The screenshot below is from the video (Monsters Inc Sully's morning, 2017) above and shows the particular pose that I was interested in from the video. I love the aggressive leaning forward aspect of the core pose with the offset arms and legs to make the silhouette really interesting. I feel I could incorporate this into my posing and especially as I can’t lift one arm very high at the moment it will be easier for me to achieve! 

Fear / Scared

The next key pose was fear or being scared themselves and I could only really think of the character Fear from Inside out, whilst plenty of others exist. I found this video (INSIDE OUT | Meet Fear | Official Disney Pixar UK, 2015) which I felt showed the scared and fearful personality of this character particularly well. As he recoils from Anger he becomes startled and then recoils into a retreated scared pose which was exactly what I was wanting to achieve with my character.

I grabbed this screenshot from the above video (INSIDE OUT | Meet Fear | Official Disney Pixar UK, 2015) that shows the recoiled pose that I wanted to achieve. I’d prefer is the leg was raised too but I really like how the body position curls away with the head twisting in the opposite direction to watch the threat. I also like the offset hands which are awkwardly placed making the character feel a little weaker. I love the curled fingers at the mouth which I feel is a particularly classic scared behavior!

Whilst Fear’s anatomy was human-like it wasn’t human and I wanted to grab some other reference of humans acting scared. I found this image below (Imgflip, 2020) which reflects some similar characteristics to Fear’s scared pose with the body tilted away, head turned towards the threat and hands raised to protect the face. In this image I really liked the facial posing as there is a tonne of subtle movements and interesting shapes occurring in the mouth, eyes and eyebrows. There isn’t a lot of uniformity which makes this pose look a lot more awkward, weak and vulnerable. 

I really wanted to find an image where the character’s leg was also raised in a way that is also shielding and protecting the body. I found this image (Novikov, no date) which captured that pose. The facial and arm poses weren’t as strong, however, this really shows how the character’s weight is distributed when they adopt a pose similar to what I was imagining which will help me immensely when posing the character. 

Acting and Primary Reference

Now that I had gathered inspiration for the key poses in this animation it was time to act it out! I wanted to achieve a high quality animation and felt like I needed to dedicate a decent bit of time to experimenting with the idea through acting. One thing I’d learnt from watching the lectures earlier was that your first take often won’t be your best and you will need to act it out multiple times to really get the best take. Below shows a range of my takes at various points - the actual number of takes was closer to 30, however, I didn’t want to flood my blog with these so chose a small selection.

My process was to film, review, reflect and make tweaks based on how the take had gone. Fairly standard process, however, this helped my refine my reference and reach an outcome that was developed and useable to support the development of my animation.

The video below was the very first take and allowed me to translate my concept into a visualised sequence which was really important. Whilst I liked the idea of the evil, steepled hands it felt a little clunky and really I just wanted to get from my starting pose to scared as quick as possible. I also didn’t like the end pose as the leg wasn’t high enough or exaggerated enough. 

Next felt like it had a much better flow but the hands I didn’t like as they didn’t move as much and felt a little static. I also tried to exaggerate the end pose but raising the leg a little further but I still felt I could push this further. So all in all this showed key developments to the first one, however, further refinements I wanted to make.

This one, I’m going to be completely honest, I didn’t mean to put on my blog! I was choosing videos from the vast selection at numbered intervals to show my journey and it happened to be a dud take that was interrupted by my dog. Despite this it does show that some takes just didn’t work all together and it’s better to restart them completely. This is especially true when our curious furry friends come in to see why we are prancing around the place! There were numerous takes I did that went wrong or just didn’t work - kind of like the blooper reels you sometimes get as part of DVD special features!

Final Reference

The below video shows the final reference that I felt happy with to move forward and use to support my animation. The process of shooting and reshooting was a long but worthwhile one. I feel if you compare this video to my first there are vast differences and this final video shows how I’ve refined the idea. The initial concept supports the development of the reference but you really don’t know how it will work until you try to act it out - when you act it out you learn what works and what doesn’t. This also means if you skip this step and go straight to animation it’s likely to end up sub par.

I really like all three key poses in this to bring my concept to life. The initial neutral head turn works as a starting point to allow the audience to take stock of the situation before jumping into the first major pose change. I like to pop from the first pose into the second - I feel I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from Sully in Monster’s Inc to create this pose and it’s worked well. Lastly, I love the more exaggerated raised leg fearful pose as it looks so drastically different from the previous pose and I look scared of whatever has happened. I’ve incorporated the body, arms and head posing well to reflect the research I explored and this helps this pose feel believable and feel the fearful emotion I was trying to portray!

Next I used ProCreate Dream to analyse and annotate the key poses, breakdowns and inbetweens. This supports my timing and understanding of how the poses are put together to build the full motion. It also makes a complex motion a lot more manageable as I can now use my research, reference and identified timing to create an animation that is grounded in reality. I annotate the frame numbers to help me easily translate time into frames which will help my posing in Maya!

The below video shows the thumbnail sketches on their own. I find this really useful as it simplifies the planning further and removes all the motion from the full video. This makes it a little easier to see what poses are happening at what time. It also means that I have my animation planned out as a shell and I can now further stylise this in Maya without needing to get it exactly the same as the live action reference. This is important as things can look a little odd if you make them completely realistic and often when we take creative liberties motions and actions can look a little more appealing!

02/06/24

The video below shows my first pass of animation blocking which focusses just on the key poses themselves and getting the character in the right place at the right time. I was ignoring the face and the hands at this point as I just wanted to get the core body poses working well. 

Whilst this has worked well I think I should have spent a little longer perfecting the poses at this point. They are largely working well, however, I think my initial look over the shoulder the hips and legs feel a little static. In my reference I saw that one foot was slightly further back than the other and I think this would have made this pose look a little more natural. I also think that the arms in the scaring poses look a little awkward as they are stuck out quite far and I think I could have made this more natural. 

Next I wanted to move onto blocking out the key face and hand poses to match the key poses. The general theory here was that when I go in to create breakdowns using the Tween Machine then everything would ease in together and I could offset things later. I also was keen to experiment with the face almost as its own character and create some of the emotions I had planned using the facial controllers. 

The below series of images show closeups of the facial posing that I’ve created. This first image below shows the looking over the shoulder pose. I tried to create an asymmetrical pose in the face, however, the right eye looks a little weird as it is much more angled and squashed than the left eye. I feel I could have opened up the centre part of the lid a little, closest to the nose, as the pupil is getting a little lost. I did really like the slightly raised eyebrow on one side to show that they are curious but not too bothered about the thing that has made them turn around.

The next pose I tried to make almost opposite the previous pose to counter the last. This pose was meant to be slightly evil, however, I think I pushed it a little too far as the skinning is looking a little pinched around the brow. I’ve also got a little bit of twinning on the lips that I think would have been better if it was more asymmetrical. However, at this point of blocking the pose was fit for purpose and could be refined later to make the brows flow together a little more smoothly.

The next facial pose was scary and I tried to make this look evil bit with an open mouth - similar to Sully from Monster’s Inc! This worked okay using the core controls, however, the mouth itself looked a little awkward as it was slightly circular. I feel I could have flattened the top lip slightly to create more of a ‘D’ shape, which might have made this look a little more scary. The brows are pinched together along with the upper cheeks too which also works well with the scary look to the face!

The last core facial pose was the shocked look. I feel I did well with the eyes here as they look wide open and vulnerable which was the feeling I was going for. The left brow is nice and arced as well as pushed high into the forehead, which works well, however, the right eyebrow doesn’t look quite as good. I was trying to incorporate asymmetry again, however, I think the 2 brows could have been more similarly posed whilst still being asymmetrical.

I then heading into ‘Blocking Plus’ using the Tween Machine to refine my breakdowns further and move the animation closer to being on 4’s. This was a useful process and I was trying to ease in and out poses to help with the transitions. I tweaked some of these poses that the Tween Machine made too so that the transitions were more interesting. I really liked the shocked breakdown I created which is shown in the video and image below. This helps create arcs in moving the action from one pose to another and also helps pop the action from one pose to the next. I do think that I could have offset one arm further so that they weren’t moving at the same time. 

I was almost ready to head to splined motion but I wanted to move into Blocking Plus Plus to add even more breakdown poses to make sure that I was controlling the motion rather than Maya. Typically in the past I’ve let Maya do a lot of the heavy lifting with breakdowns and I feel it’s one reason why my human character animation could be improved. I do work extensively in the graph editor which can relieve some of this but on this animation I wanted to try and use more traditional techniques through hand animating. This was feeling quite good and you were really starting to get a sense of the timing and emotion change between the poses, which was the goal of this exercise!

03/06/24

This next playblast shows further development and the splined version of the animation. Now that it is splined you get a different feeling to the motion and slightly different reads on the poses as they aren’t held as long. Therefore I have spent some time experimenting with pose tweaking to help make these poses read a little more clearly, often through exaggeration. I’ve experimented with some light animation curve tweaking in the graph editor to ensure that these initial motions are smooth and blending as they should without any jerks. There are also a couple of additional breakdown poses on the feet to help with the balance and transfer of weight now that it is in motion.

Whilst this animation is far from done I felt like I was understanding the animation sequence production pipeline better through detailed blocking and use of the Tween Machine. I really love the pop from the initial neutral pose to the scary forward pose as this happens over just a few frames but it feels like it works - especially as the next pose is held. 

The plan for development next would be to do a more detailed graph editor pass to analyse and tweak the motion of all key controls to help the flow of motion. I’d then need to experiment with creating more offset and overlapping action to help make things move more naturally. I’d also need to look more closely at the finger animation and facial animation to ensure that these transition naturally from one pose to the next. However, I wanted to get some feedback at this point from Alex Williams to see how my poses were working before I tweaked and offset too much stuff that would be hard to do!

Feedback from Alexander Williams

A. Williams (2024, pers. comm., 3rd June) promptly got back to me with some feedback that was almost too obvious! I had positioned my character facing the camera and this can make the animation look really weird as you are breaking the fourth wall (Williams, 2018)! When we position the eyes at the camera it gives the effect that the character is talking or acting directly at us rather than a character within the imagined world that is offscreen and this tends to look very odd (Williams, 2024)! I was sent a couple of links (Williams, 2018 & Williams, 2024)that helped me understand this clearly and I really liked the tricks shown in the eye controller blog post which shows how you can place the eye controller offscreen so that the character’s eyes are locked there rather than at the camera. I definitely locked my eye controller at the camera and I could definitely improve this in the future. 

I feel this happened due to my set up of reference capture where I was also acting at the camera. This is something I will need to bear in mind in the future because although I achieved poses and animation close to my reference if the reference has problems then these will also be present in the animation. I should have considered doing this from a different angle or focusing on something else other than the camera when I captured my reference. I feel this is something that will influence my reference capture in the future to support more believable acting.

Conclusion

I decided to end this unit at this point and use the feedback Alex gave me in the next animation. I did this for a few reasons, firstly, I’d spent a lot of time on this unit and needed to progress forward. Secondly, I feel I have planned an animation that is a little too big and definitely bigger than what was intended. I feel I should have posed a character in an emotion and created a small animation loop of this rather than a full sequence. This was particularly true as the future lecturers had been added to the virtual learning environment and it looked like these were going to break these processes down further so I had essentially jumped the gun a little bit! 

None-the-less, I felt like this was still good experience and particularly learning through doing. I’d built a strong foundation and received some valuable feedback that would support me well through this module. I’d be definitely making sure to use the process of researching and then acting out to lead to well informed posing in addition to multiple takes of the acting to develop the most well developed reference to use to support the animation. I just needed to make sure that I didn’t act to the camera as this breaks the fourth wall and tends to look odd! 

This was definitely an intense introduction to this module exploring posing in depth. However, I’ve learnt that if you can really perfect these poses and spend time refining them your end animation will be significantly stronger. I’ve also learnt about the Tween Machine and how this can be used to quickly inbetween your animation and control the transition of posing. This is something I am sure I will get better with over time, however, it has been good to explore it early as it has shown me how I can control the animation rather than Maya doing it!

Learning Outcomes 

1. Recognise the role of body language in animation
2. Craft expressive facial animations
3. Utilise eye movements to convey subtext
4. Operate animation rigs with proficiency
5. Integrate theoretical concepts into practice

I feel I have achieved the learning outcomes, listed above, because I have : 

1. I have recognised the role of body language through my research, acting and posing of characters in Maya that show a range of emotions through posing alone.
2. I have crafted a range of facial expressions based on research and acting with a focus on both exaggerated and subtle facial animations.
3. I have experimented with eye movements and posing to help convey emotion through facial animation. However, this is an area I need to develop further in the future to ensure that I am not breaking the fourth wall.
4. I've experimented with a range of animation rigs and reflected on their viability. I've also found a rig I am comfortable with that I plan to use for more humanoid focused animations within this module.
5. I've integrated these concepts into practice through the production of my final animation that shows a change of emotions. Whilst this animation isn't fully polished it explored the blocking out and inbetweening process to help convey emotion. I've also received valuable feedback that I can integrate into the next animation. I realised that I planned too much for this animation and created more of a sequence rather than a short loop showing an emotion, which is another reason why I wanted to move forward and develop the quality of my work on future animations.

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