Animation Pt. 2

In order to keep things backed up and prevent causing problems on other parts of the animation, I saved each part of the animation as a new file - this allowed me to work with things on the current section without influencing anything other part of the timeline.

After using footsteps, I then had to manually manipulate the character to animate him. His first movement was to realise he was about to step on a TV remote, and pull his leg back whilst looking down towards his feet. To do this, I took the final frame of the walking animation, and manually used keyframes to rotate and pull the leg joints so that he would pull his leg back, and also set keyframes for his head to animate. I did find a few problems with enveloping at this stage - so I had to fix these when necessary, in the same way as I had done before.

He also reaches down with his arm, as if to bend to pick up the object.



Next, I wanted to have him pick up the remote. I saw this as quite a complicated motion - but however, I think in this kind of situation it can be advantageous to use cameras and cutting things to suggest actions without actually seeing them happen - in this instance you see him bending down, and then the next thing you see is him standing up with the remote now in his hand.

I then used keyframing to move his back, arms, and head - whilst keyframing the remote to move with his actions. I quite liked the use of camera work here as I felt I got some good angles on what was going on.



Next, I used more of a first person perspective - this was perhaps one of my favourite parts of the animation. Instead of watching the minotaur simply doing all the actions from one generic view, I decided to mix it up with various angles. In this way, you can see the Minotaur looking at the remote, and I then used keyframing to animate the hands and fingers, so that he appears to press the remote.