Week 39 - Starting Monday 7th July

 This week was mostly working on the dog walk cycle and getting started with Shot 3.

To begin with I started analyzing the footage I took of my own dog for reference...

Walk cycle - this walk is quite curious and cautious, the approach to the biscuit is slower and the head lowers as she sniffs the biscuit out before she gets to it, reference for shot 6 when the dog approaches the 2nd biscuit:

Shot 6

Searching and sniffing - she is actually around to find more biscuits/crumbs as she just finished eating one. This is good reference for Shot 3 when the dog re-enters the frame to find his biscuit gone and starts searching around for it:

Shot 3

I also tried slowing down some of the footage I shot to analyse it better:

Run cycle (slow):

Walk cycle (slow):

Analyzing the footage by drawing over it, simplifying shapes (such as the bouncing ball animation exercise) to better see the bounce of hips/shoulders/head, and movement of legs:

This is a quick animation test I did on my iPad of a dog walk cycle - this helped work out the key poses and timings of a walk cycle:

I also tried out a quick run cycle test:

Working on the 3D character walk cycle:

Keyframe all feet forward...

...then keyframe all feet back.

Then grab keys of different feet and move to offset from the others.

Next I keyframed the paws lifting off the ground - the passing positions.

Rotated the paws just as they hit the ground.

Adding rotation to the hip joint and start it moving just slightly earlier than the foot moving forward, which should help the illusion that the hips are driving the movement.

Translating the hip joint up and down - should start moving down just after the foot hits the ground.
Did the same with the shoulder root joint for the front legs.

Added slight rotation on head joint going side to side.

I rotated the head up vertically as translating wasn't producing a realistic movement. Also added in the ears animation, reacting to the movement of the head.

Adding movement to the tail to swing along with the walk.

Final walk cycle turnaround:

It's a quick walk, so I tried grabbing all the keyframes and stretching them out in the graph editor to slow the walk down slightly:

Slowed walk cycle:

Also this week...

As shots for animating were being handed out I realized that the final characters still needed to be scaled into the environment. Kirti worked on this and I noted down the final scales for each character just in case any animated characters need to be imported into the shots.
Dog: 0.137
Bird: 0.085
Human: 0.414

There was also a problem with character texture files not matching to the UV's which was spotted and sorted on the Friday.

Had a look over the environment with Kirti, the environment was gamma corrected, but then looked too bright, tried to adjust in Photoshop with saturation and exposure. Then decided that how it was looking before was a better look for the film. So everything was un-gamma corrected. Maybe except for the grass, which used to turn out more yellow...