Major Project - Lazarus - 005 + 006

005

After getting some of the bg and start of shot 01 ready I started getting ready to animate the character.

I did film myself and a friend of mine as reference footage. I tried setting 2 cameras up (1 for the front and 1 for the side as each shot is from a different perspective) so I could position the character up with the reference footage.

I did start this very close to the hand in date but unfortunately wasn't able to start any of this work until now as I've had to work on as much as I could outside of uni to pay my bills.

I just wish I was able to put all of my effort into this work and all of my work from school/passion projects.

I also tried matching the camera but it didn't really work that well and would have taken a load of time trying to set it up which I didn't even know would work so I just went with trying to match them by eye.

The character wasn't really matching up very well so I looked for some good reference footage online. I found this video on YouTube by Endless Reference with loads of different walk cycles with different angles which is perfect for what I need. After looking through a load of different walk cycles, I ended up going with this one as it gave the character a tiny limp and was a lot slower than the other references.

I did a similar thing with the cameras setting up multiple cameras around the character so I could switch between each perspective easily.

I also had a lot of trouble seeing the reference properly, mainly I couldnt tell which leg was which and had to play the video back to work out which leg was which so I took them into after effects and just boosted the levels a bit so I had some more detail in the footage.

I also tried to match the feet and head positions at the start so it is more consistent with each camera.

006

I spent a good 5-6 days working on the character animation, I think it was slowly getting their but it was still looking very choppy. I first started by animating the hips to move forward/back, up/down and left/right to simulate the hips moving with the leg moves. I then started with the legs and arms which was fine until I had realised I had to move the spine joints which I then had to sort out all of the keyframes from the arms again to match the moves made to the spine.

I was already past the deadline for the assignment and I had messed up and I think restarting the animation completely would be the best option but would have needed to spend another couple days at least to get the animation at a decent point so I made a decision to use a couple mixamo animation's so I could finish the shot a lot quicker and I can just focus on the render now and it will mean I can start the other assignment and try to get that done sooner. This will also mean I am likely going to fail the assignment and most likely fail the course, I am hoping I am able to resit an assignment or something instead of resitting the entire year as I don't think I will be able to do that anyway.

I picked 2 animations from Mixamo, the "Stop Walking" and the "Look over shoulder" animations and added those animations into their own motion clips. I then brought in one of the animations into the other animations dope sheet and overlapped the 2 animations so the software can interpolate the animations. Although as the walking animation isn't walking on the spot and is actually moving forward I had to create a new pivot point for the new animation to be in the correct position when interpolating. I did also stretch the time out a bit on the look over the shoulder animation and cut it up a bit to help it blend better with the first anim.

Now I had a decent animation and I had already rendered a lot of the start of the shot out, I could now just export the character animation as an fbx and import it into shot 01. I did have a lot of trouble trying to export as an fbx as cinema 4d would keep crashing so I decided to export it as alembic and just reapply the textures again in the scene.

There wasn't really any good way of adding the character into the ship without the camera seeing the character clipping in/out so I just keyframed a position move right before the character is fully onscreen so it passes off as the character walking.