Wed, December 9

Walkin' After Deadline—11:53 AM

I very nearly missed my submission deadline this week to convert my walk animation into a personality walk. To begin with, I polished last week's walk, adjusting all the little areas I hadn't quite perfected the first time. This would be the foundation for my new walk, so I needed it to be its best.

There remain a couple of pesky wobbles in the knees, an artifact of IK (inverse kinematics), where I have no direct control over his damn knees, but can only position his hips and feet and let the computer place the knee in between. I'm really pleased with how far I came on this problem, but I couldn't spend all day on it, since I had a personality walk to create also.

My first choice for a personality walk was something akin to the Verbal Kint limp from The Usual Suspects, but I was advised against doing anything quite so subtle, since it needs to "read" in the rather small viewer window we have on the site. I settled on a very determined, brusque, sped-up walk, and set about putting in the hip rotation and ample stride length that would bring that about. Clearly there is still a long way to go, but luckily this is another two week assignment, so I will continue refining. Here's the blocking pass – again, it's a little jumpy because there isn't animation on every frame, and in this case it's not a full render but a "playblast" which is Maya's version of just a quick output of the animation to see how things are coming together, without all the bells and whistles (such as anti-aliasing, for those readers familiar with that term).

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Thu, December 3

These balls are made for walkin'—1:07 PM

Countless hours (actual count: probably four) were spent taking the "vanilla walk" from blocking to final animation, with exacting attention paid to the arc of the ankle, the "pop" of the knee, and the rotation of the foot. It's all in service of making the walk look as normal as possible: tricking the brain into believing that the graphic approximation on the screen is really a character walking. Among the harder things to do, since we all see people walking all the time. Thus, your eye tends to pick out any little glitch if an animator has missed his mark. It's amazing how much difference it makes if you move the toe a little bit higher for one frame, or move the ankle forward or back a frame faster or slower. This is a 48-frame assignment, which (if you don't already know), means 2 seconds. Because it's a vanilla walk, it's all supposed to be very straight and symmetrical, which means it's highly mathematical. Animate one leg for 12 frames, mirror everything to the other leg on the opposite cycle to get to 24 frames, then repeat to get to 48. So basically you are animating one half second of movement, and it takes two weeks to get it right. That's how intricate it is! How fortunate that I like intricate things.

Luckily we have another walk to work on this week and next, because I feel like I had to rush through parts of this one just to make the deadline. The second walk will be a "personality walk," in contrast to the bland conformity of the vanilla walk.

A classmate had the bright idea to color the far leg darker (the left leg, in this case), so that it would be more visually distinct while the character is walking. I'm not sure exactly how he went about this. It's not trivial to select the parts of the leg and change their color, because once a character is "rigged," its individual parts are kind of hard to access. Instead of clicking on his feet and legs to move them, the animator (me) clicks on his "controllers."

(For a little more depth on how this works, see some more pictures of the Ballie rig.)

In a normal production workflow, this is a good thing, because animators don't need to worry about the character's geometry or its colors or textures, or even the camera placement in most cases. Someone in another department is taking care of all of that stuff – the animator just handles the performance. Having everything else locked means no costly mistakes where something might accidentally get deleted or broken. But right now we are all generalists, lording over every domain, so if that color is going to change, it'll be us who changes it.

Technically, you could use the Hypergraph or Outliner to locate the individual pieces of geometry corresponding to the left leg, select them, and assign them all new textures with adjusted colors. I found it far simpler to just add a little "scrim" to the scene.

In live action, you'd never get away with this, because it has to bisect the character, and you'd catch hell from the actor's union rep about that, but in the virtual world, anything is possible. I created a plane, gave it a black texture, dialed its opacity way, way down, and put it right through the middle of Ballie.

Voila! Right leg clear; left leg dark. No need to hunt down individual pieces of geometry; no need to create separate "darker" versions of the knee color and the foot color. Just click and go.

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