Challenge 9: Advanced Body Mechanics
The reference footage I chose was a dancing clip. I edited it in After effect to give it a time code. Also, I found out the frame per second is 25. And I brought this footage into Maya as the beginning of animating.
In the blocking stage, I reminded myself that I’m animating dancing. So, I paid specifically attention to the feet movements in order to get the timing correct. Besides, the dancer in this clip has a lot of jumping movement. The height and center of gravity were also two things I paid attention.
Then I convert stepped animation to splines. Cleaning up the bumping in graph editor. And there are too many elbow and knee popping in the animation. I guess it might because dancing need plenty knee and elbow rotate. So, I fixed all these by adjusting the position of the knee direction indicator and center of gravity. And I rekeyed some poses in order to perfect the performance and the fluidity of movement.
Following is the final animation with motion blur.