Breakdowns
All of the following animations are hand-keyed.
Dance
For this piece, my focus was on creating smooth arcs to help make the animation look more appealing. Therefore, the motion trail editor was my best friend. I went online and found a nice dance reference, which I took into Davinci Resolve to cut some parts out and mirror segments to make the sequence flow better. In Maya, I began by blocking out the main poses then cleaning up the foot contacts so that there was no sliding. Once that was done and I was ready for splining, I attached a motion trail to each hand and foot to clearly visualise their movement throughout the dance. This was very helpful, as it allowed me to see their exact paths from anywhere in the viewport. If any of the paths looked jagged in places, I could easily go to that exact frame range and translate the foot/hand's control until the motion path was a smooth curve.
Due to there being no lip sync or crazy facial expressions, I felt comfortable leaving the facial animation until closer to the end of the process. I kept them quite low-key because I didn't want to take the attention away from the body's movement.
Lip Sync
I really enjoyed animating this one, but it certainly took a while before I started feeling happy with how it looked. The audio comes from season 4, episode 1 of The Walking Dead Game. I chose it because I liked the stuttering, the little pauses throughout, and the gradual build-up to the explosive shouting.
I filmed a few takes of myself to use as reference, which (while embarrassing!) were incredibly useful. The very first thing I did in the scene before animating the body was the lip sync. I put all of the lip controllers onto their own layer so that I could isolate their movement when adjusting things later down the line. For the blocking, I attempted something new. Instead of keying all controls on the same frames, I keyed different controls at different times. However, I won't be using this method again because when I transitioned to splining, it was a little hard to keep track of exactly when and where certain controls were keyed.
I got a lot of helpful feedback during this animation, with one of the main comments being that the eyes were too 'starey'. I needed to add in a lot more eye and eyelid movement, as well as blinks to make him look more realistic. Once I got to the polishing stage, I got some more feedback where I was advised to really focus on the eyebrows and tiny details of the face. Eyebrows are a fantastic way of expressing emotion in a piece like this, so they shouldn't move slowly or be boring. As for the tiny details of the face, I made sure to animate nose flares, the Adam's apple, cheek skin, and the eye bags. To get these details looking correct, I paid close attention to things like the shape of the mouth, the position of the jaw, whether the eyes were open/closed, whether the cheeks needed to be puffed when saying a word, etc. If I felt unsure, I would look at myself in the mirror, make the face, and see which direction the skin was moving.
Elephant
This was initially just going to be a walk cycle, but I felt it would be boring to watch and too repetitive. Therefore, I decided to break it up by adding a head shake halfway through and a reach-out to the camera at the end.
It's safe to say this rig was not my favourite. However, I really wanted to animate an elephant and this was the only free Maya one I could find, so I powered through! The toughest parts of it to animate were the ears, trunk, and clavicles/shoulders. Firstly, the ears had far too many controllers, many of which seemed to be working against each other. The skinning on them wasn't the best either, so I had to be careful when rotating and translating each control to avoid any clipping or texture stretching. For the trunk, the IK controls caused major skinning issues so I had to animate it using FK controls. It had around 8 controls, which meant that whenever I wanted to change the timing or pose on one, I almost always had to change it for all of the others too. Lastly, the shoulders were tough to animate because moving them up even a tiny amount would cause leg popping, even if it didn't look like the leg was actually straight. Therefore, I had their default/resting value below zero and would only go slightly above when the leg was weight-bearing to accentuate the pose.
As well as all of this, I also had to hand-animate each individual section of skin jiggle using the red circle controllers dotted around the skin. I found myself wanting more of these controllers to be in places that didn't have any, whilst simultaneously thinking some areas that did have them didn't need them at all! Animation layers were a big help here because I could easily adjust the amount of skin movement I wanted with each step.
Baseball Bat Tricks
I didn't want to see a locator for a very long time after I had finished animating this. I ended up using 16 of them in this scene because I needed one each time the bat changed position. This means that there were 8 for the bat being attached to the hands (including shifting positions), 5 for it leaving his hands, and 3 for adjustments. I chose to use locators instead of adding constraints directly to the hands and bat because it was a less destructive workflow and easier to manage, as it allowed me to label them in the order/way they were used.
I wanted to stay true to the reference, so I avoided using the same generic palmar grasp each time he gripped the bat and instead tried to do something different with the fingers each time. I made sure to add subtle shifts and twists to the feet due to his centre of gravity moving around, which helped make it more realistic. I didn't want him to be grounded with unmoving feet the entire time.
I decided to mostly use FK arms instead of IK because it would be much easier to avoid popping in the elbows. However, I ended up using IK for the hand on the ground at the end (because it doesn't need to move) and on the left arm when both hands were holding the bat together.
Squirrel (1)
This is one of the squirrel animations that I did for the short film 'Bushtail Bandit'. Squirrels are very twitchy with small movements but smooth and fluid in big movements. I added a lot of small twitches in the tail because when I was studying reference videos, that was a big thing that stood out to me across all of them. I didn't want too much movement here because this was part of a CFX pipeline, so I knew that the hair bouncing from the groom sim would do some of the work.
Since he's a big squirrel, I had to play around with his positioning and poses to get him situated in the right place on the feeder. This was actually quite difficult for the eating pose due to him being hunched over, as I needed to avoid his ear tufts and nose from clipping into the feeder. The margins were fine, but I ended up with an eating pose that worked.
Squirrel (2)
Believe it or not, there aren't many reference videos of squirrels taking off with a jetpack! Therefore, I had to improvise by splicing together some different live-action videos that were a sufficient base for what I needed.
This is another shot from 'Bushtail Bandit', and this time it would have CFX (groom) and FX (jetpack smoke + flames) added on after my animation. This meant that I had to anticipate when the smoke would start coming out, how much would come out, and when. I made sure to communicate with the FX artist in my group so that the timings of the tail being pushed down by the smoke would be correct.