WEEK 14: Animation Direction 1 - Game Cycles -- Idles, blending cycles, continued

Last week before your due date for the cycles.

As it took a little longer to get started with these cycles I'm altering the assignment as we discussed in class.
The assignment description now states, "The sequence must contain at least 3 of the following cycles, blended together into one scene."  Click here to read the full description.

We just touched on Idle Cycles last class, so I'll dig into the details a bit more. The humble idle is the Rubic's cube of cycles. How your character behaves when he's just waiting around conveys a lot of attitude. You'll need a lot of subtle control to keep a character alive. Too little movement and they'll just look dead, too much and they'll appear to be having a seizure. :o)

I must warn you that as simple as it may seem to make a character 'do nothing', it is most diabolical! With great subtlety you must add some movement to every part of the character. Nothing should bump or pop, everything should have a nice smooth arc and you should not really be able to pick out where the cycle starts and stops -- it should be a loop about 1-2 seconds long.

Greeks gave the world souvlaki
 and contrapposto

The key to idles is mastering Overlapping Action. Show how movement flows from the main muscle groups of the body out to the extremities using the 'wave principle'.

Start with a nice pose. Work in a little contrapposto if you can.

woah, that's a little too
 much contrapposto

Get the attitude working before you move on to animation. Create a slightly different pose in the middle and then some breakdowns in between. This looks not too bad, but the movement will all be happening on the same keyframes. Get into the details by offsetting the joints. All changes of direction must use lot of slow ins & outs. Use your infinity/cycle views and check for smoothly flowing curves in that Graph Editor.