Body mechanics, as the name suggests, is the way your body moves, it’s unique mechanics to allow you to move and do everything a human (in this case) does, everytime we move, a lot of movements are done, no movement is done by one muscle or member.
So, in animation, we have to know how body mechanics work and be aware of every tiny movement, they are the key to make a character unique and alive. Movement is part of the personality of a character, no one moves the same way, as no one has the same body mechanics, orelse we would just be robots, repeated and standard movements all equal. It’s just not appealing nor realistic.
When animating, the things we need to be aware of are the secondary actions and overlaping movements of the body, for example, when a character jumps from a high place to the floor the arms go up and follow the path of the body, and go down a bit after the body hits the floor as a way to give some balance when landing. Also, in a jump the body doesn’t just go and falls, it needs preparation, so it usually bends to boost the jump. All these actions are part of body mechanics, it’s instint, nothing moves without a force either driving or pulling it.
A very good example of body mechanics are sports, parkour, challenges like Wipeout, Ninja Warrior, World’s Largest, etc. Things that take effort and require some skills and training.
In this exercise, we were asked to do, ofcourse, a body mechanics animation. Look for reference, choose a character and animate it. I chose parkour, every teenager had once the dream to do those jumps and behave like a super hero. Ofcourse in reality we do fall more than we actually look cool.
At first I wanted to make my character do something like a circuit with some obstacles and walls for it to jump. So i downloaded some videos and got them together as reference and decided to do just the first clip, as it was more complex and had more than one jump.
My set up was inspired in the first reference clip and I modeled it directly on MAYA. At first it was much more complex as I wanted to do 2 of the clips, so I extended my circuit, only to later discover that I didn’t have time to do so many jumps and things.
In the end I reduced it to just the first part and this was the final setup.
Reference
In the reference video the man is very quick to jump the wall, so I decided to make my character run 3 steps before the jump, I used The animators survival kit reference for the run and then used both the image and the video for reference, as the video is filmed from the back view it’s easier to make your own movement with both. I chose Sam as my character, I saw a parkour spirit in him.
On the first jump I noticed the feet were not synchronized with the reference, but honestly I just thought that it would be good to do that brain exercise, to actually have to understand body mechanics and not just copy reference. Ofcourse, the next jump I had the same problem, so I changed the way he made the second jump after climbing the wall.
With this animation i really understood the value of the hips, not that I didn’t know it’s importance before, but I believe that it clicked. It’s really the key to every movement, its like the second brain of it all. The final jump was so much about the hips that if I didn’t knew it before it had to be then or the animation would never be finished.
It was much longer that I expected or wanted it to be, and just for blocking… Polishing can take longer because I want everything to be at it’s best, but blocking has to be fast. Spent too much time just for the run, then I took a break and really focused on the blocking meaning! So it was faster, seeing Pixar blocking clips was a relief because I realized that it really doesn’t have to be perfect, it’s just a rough preview of what it is going to be (not just when studying, in real life too).
The first playblast was terrible and he was just running, not even jumping and super fast. So thankful playblasts exist. So I changed the keyframes a bit further and things started looking better and I started the jump.
After this, my workflow improved and I finally got faster. Had a few problems when climbing the wall as the arms were not being cooperative and they do a very weird turn in an in-between frame as well as the feet in the final twisted jump. At some point I decided I needed to animate the knees but then that began to be a really big problem and I deleted the keyframes, I realized that the rotation of the feet where enough for the pose I wanted. Up until now my feet only have animation on the rotation x. Body mechanics forbids such thing. Everything moves.
Despite all that needs correcting I was pretty happy with the final result and can’t wait to finish the polish.
Final blocking playblast
Polish/Spline
I seriously never took so much time to finish polishing an animation, but I’m happy with the final result although some things need to be fixed. The part that really took more time were the hands as they move if I touch the spine controls, so I had a small cube near them to keep track of their position.
On the building I also added some breaks so the character could have its fingers grab it when climbing the wall and look more realistic, or else he would be just pushing his hands against the wall.
The wall part was the most difficult as I didn’t copy exactly all the movements from the reference footage and had to make a few changes, so I ended up just imagining the movements and occasionally watching the footage for movement reference.
With this work I realised I need to improve my hand animation, and that I really should have a keyframe on every frame as it slows down the workflow – learnt it the worst way. Hopefully I will not repeat that.
Final Playblast