Prototyping:

Once briefed on our challenge of animating jumps with characters, we were shown what character models we would be using to follow on with the work and do the animation work the following week after we had done some research. during this prep week I was considering if the character that I made earlier on in this course would be able to be used for this assignment, unfortunately, my teacher said I would still need to animate the given rig from class in case there are any differences between the number of bones or control points between the rigs, which I understand, but incase I finish the standard exercise first I thought I would use this week to also make sure my own character was still working with all the IK and FK handles.
Another recommendation was to get the research out of the way this week, focusing on primary and secondary research.

Our homework this week was to research the jump exercise further, Gather references for inspiration, and shoot our jump reference footage.
I managed to get my character into a suitable situation for animating on Thursday this week.
I completed pretty much all my research by Sunday.

Today we were asked to block in main body poses for our jumps, using our existing knowledge of the bouncing ball exercise, use gathered research, reference and planning to animate a jump from one platform to another from a stationary standing position. we were asked to set the graph editor to stepping for our blocking in phase, to helpfully visualise full body movements that arnt on every frame, just every now and then where the whole body moved a decent amount to help us later on do the inbetween frames once we have the key poses in place.

Our homework this week was to do the block-in stage utilizing our reference footage within Maya, ready for splining next week.
I managed to do the block-ins for 3 different types of jumps, as I was unsure how much variety I needed to demonstrate when showing my unique jump, so I had some options to work with. I completed all of these on Tuesday this week. I quite enjoyed this simplistic aspect of blocking in and animating.

Below are screenshots of my graph editors in 'Stepped Mode'.

Today we were told we should have our jumps blocked in by now, and ready for splining and then polising.
Our homework this week was to: set our animation to spline mode and get ready for final polish. also save several playblast tests and to document our prototyping.

Shown below I did some 'final renders' of my jumps, later to realise we actually needed our reference in the video too. So I later went back, improved on some of the feedback and animation, and re-play blasted my jumps, which are shown on my final work page.

Today we were told to finish polishing off our jump animations and were set a new task at the end of the lesson to complete as homework.
Sanjay, our tutor, helped me nail a key visual element that looked a bit off in my animated twisting jump, the Tina rig, he noticed a jerkyness in the hips and shoulders that sped up slightly at the wrong times in the air. Narrowing down this key element and smoothing out the splines in the graph editor helped my jump to have a much smoother and realistic appearance.

Today we were told to upload our jumps and walks onto the Padlet page to showcase to the class. A benefit of showing our progress to others is you get to see other people's techniques or approaches. I am willing to learn and adapt from my colleagues and have acknowledged the benefit of using multiple camera angles when shooting reference animation footage from watching one of my classmates named Nourallah. who had two super clean references, shot in from of a blank white wall, this helped to gain not just the y and z placements of our jumping character but also helped position the parts of the rig along the x-axis, or in other words having an extra camera shooting from the front view of where your jumping to, seeing your front-on view, I noticed how much easier it was to see the weight distribution change over from the right leg to the left, or vice versa. Seeing only from one side view makes it hard to tell where exactly the weight is distributed, and also the distance the body parts are from the camera. Having only one side view camera makes the reference feel 2D and harder to gage depth, when using for animation.

One of the homework this lesson was to research into walk types. both realistic character walks and unrealistic character walks. also to make sure we have adequate references for either of these choices later when we come to animate one of them. I wanted to ensure I had high-quality references when filming, incorporating the advantages of using multiple camera angles to achieve a solid animation, meticulously planned and positioned from the multiple camera angles I use.
Toward the end of the lesson, I went with a group down to a clear space in the University to find two good blank white walls that intersect so i could have two cameras pointing from different angles and still have me appearing on a white background. very happy to find on floor 2 that there was an unoccupied space that we could use for shooting our reference, I emphasized collaboration by letting all 6 of the group utilize my camera and tripod to shoot very clean and bright footage in front of this open space.
I managed to record 3 Unique walk styles references, using 2 camera angles on each jump.

I plan to get my research done on Thursday this week.
I completed a bunch of research on Thursday about realistic and animated personality walks, but want to dive deeper later on.

Today is about putting together our filmed personality walk references and importing them into Maya as frames to help base our walk off and start animating it and today was also about getting things ready for a formative review next week.

When importing my video sequence into Maya, I found not only was it shaky, as i chose to use two cameras to capture from differnt angles to review my footage, but one of the cameras was handheld, i was thankful for the helpful hand of Emmanuelle who supplied a quality camera for filming, but due to this being handheld i thought i would go through the extra process of using adobe after affects stablise motion plugin and re render the footage, this dramatically made both the footages stable and helped me focus on my animation much better in the viewport.
Another way i improved my reference was within maya, using an animation on the scale of the video reference plane, i made it keep me in the center and roughly the same size thoughout the sequence, initially the camera which was filming from the front obviously has me walking towards it, this results in me getting drastically bigger as the footage continues as im getting much closer to the camera, this wasnt helpful in maya as i kept changing size in the background in my reference. to help fix and counter this i animated the size of the image plane to get smaller over the time to combat the size of me in the video getting bigger, so in maya i stayed roughly the same size within my reference.

I have shown it here below, the image plane on the right is bigger at first, and at the end of the animation is has gotten smaller.

Today was about getting ready for our formative review.
we were asked to have our projects ready and uploaded to the SyncSketch website, the jumping, walking on spot, and character walk.
i was pretty confident with what i had produced, i decided to do 2 jumping animations in the end as i was enjoying this process quite a lot.
the animations are shown on my final work page.
I did a more elegant jump with the woman model; Tina.
and i did a more cartoon anime game style jump with the rig; Fred
Sanjay gave me one point of feedback for this review. to give the feet more of an arc or swing to the sides, and because my feet moved forward and backwards in a very parralel way, which in real life they sort of swing around like the arms slightly. I thoroughly agreed with this point and adressed it as soon as i got home on this day.

Today was a catch-up lesson to help the rest of the class get on top of their projects. I felt pretty excited for our last task but had to wait for now. In the meantime for this lesson, aside from my Maya software crashing multiple times and delaying my progress, My tutor Sanjay came over and gave me a large amount of feedback on my personality walk which I much appreciated. Tips like adding more up and down motion in the hips to bop with as he walks, also to add a ground plane to help identify sliding on the feet, and also the upper body and how his shoulders really have weight in them and force down with each landing, as well as a point about having the head rotate with the body and not just translate up and down. I felt all of these points were very valid and could help for me to acheive a much more expressive and cohesive animation.

Today we started our pushing animation task where we were instructed go out and film our reference footage and bring it into Maya to start blocking in and splining our animation.
I set out with a group of 7 friends to find a suitable location to film the pushing.
I wanted to set myself more of a challenge so i felt there would be more of a challenge with animating my character not just pushing on a immovable wall, but having my object slide along after pushing means i would have to animate my character also moving along with the object simultaniously while it slides which i felt gave me more exitement for this greater challenge at testing my animating skills or knowledge.
The room we decided on in the end was the same room i had for my recent formative review with our tutor Sanjay. it was a small room which was unoccupied and just required some temporary moving of tables to achive a decent space to film in. i decided i would use a cabinet as the object being pushed as i felt it would be great, as it meant i could apply a large amount of force while showing the compression and small movements of my body while i push as well as not being too light so it would take me some time to push and wouldnt go off the screen too quickly. my friends all agreed the cabnet was a good choice.
i asked one of my friends to borrow their phone to record a behind view as i thought having another angle would help position my body along the sides. it showed not as helpful in this task as the others tasks before and only really showed how far apart my feet were placed, as the top half of the body was angled down and away from this camera while pushing the object it was quite hard to see this part of my body placement.

This week was half term.
I set out a plan to have my push animation complete within the first week.
I completed the push on Wednesday this week and was very happy with it.

This was the second week of half term. Even though I thought I had completed the push very well, I decided to revisit it this week and see if I could spot any errors in my animation. I did end up spotting some slight feet sliding towards the beginning of my animation here that was not intended like the rest of the feed sliding that I animated; after making this adjustment, it really helped to solidify a realistic start to the animation, helping to bring to life the anticipation action at the start of the animation.

This week I got feedback from our tutor Sanjay, who said my animation was very good, but I could push or the pose in areas such as the stretching with the anticipation action. His stomach could be pushed out a bit more, giving a more definitive curve in his posture, helping to emphasize that he is about to push a very heavy weight.
I found not only curves within posture help to give a more fluent and expressive animation but also often having much smoother lines in the graph editor, which untimately are a underlying path for the movements along axis's.
Using my knowledge from last semester's line drawing with my tutor Dan, I took another look back at this animation trying to see if i could exaggerate any of the poses that are seemingly 'S' or 'C' curve shaped as a futhur refinement in my animation. 

This week was about getting ready for submission.
I wanted to finish creating and setting a scene for more immersion and coherence within my animation.
I'm thinking about possibly creating a different object my character could be pushing that would still fit the shape of what he's pushing so that I could swap it out easily. I opted to model a washing machine in the end.

Today was submission time. Updating blog, fixing spelling errors, etc.