Chapter 2.5

Practical Interpretation

For my first practical animation experiment, I wanted to use McLuhan's theory of “less is more”, and modeled a low poly character. I rigged the character at certain pivot points enabling her to only move slightly and not like a realistic human. I choose to first try this technique and based my model on a very successful 2d cartoon Kim Possible.

From the video you can see that Kim moves only at certain pivot point and you can clearly see that this is a 2d animation and conveys no connection to the real world. It does however fulfill its brief of representing a young girl. If I was to place this within “The Uncanny Valley” it would fall lower than prosthetic somewhere in the plastic/lifeless area. My first task was to model Kim close to how she looks so I got some images and modeled her.

The next stage was to rig Kim so that she would be able to complete a basic face morph in order for the charter to interact with the audience; I also decided to call my version Clara instead of Kim. When it came to creating the morph I wanted to only use a maximum of 5 - 8 weights which would be similar to the Pixar Toy Story set up, or a stiff toy rig.

Here we have a version of Clara mouthing the basic vowels for speech, I only added a simple audio track I recorded in ProTools without syncing it, as for this experiment it wouldn't be needed but will give the idea of a plastic toy movement. This is still nowhere near the realm of realism yet like the 2d animation of Kim, it does fulfill its purpose of interaction and animation.

I added a bedroom and some objects to see how the animation would interact and if the addition of physical objects would add to the overall feel and emotional connection to the animation.

For experimental purposes I decided to edit the mesh and add some hair segments. I converted the segments to strands and constrained them as an editable poly mesh. I wanted to see would more realistic hair strands add to the emotional response to the character.

The Walk Cycle – Biped Animation

This is an animation I did for my Higher National Diploma. The animation was created using a combination of biped motion capture and key framing. I put this animation in to show a basic walk cycle key-framed. You can see that the COM (Centre of Mass) doesn't move from its pivot point and is stable through out the entire animation. Knowing what I know now after researching Biped Animation by Michele Bousquet and Michael McCarthy the COM should move with the hip joints and react with the gravity, which should have a mass of -980.

Continue to Chapter 3.1 - Character Biped & Quadped