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And to emphasize one of the most common, IMO, misconceptions about walk cycles....
The legs don't make us walk. The body walks and the legs follow. You dont' animate the legs for a walk cycle, you animate the body, and the legs follow along to maintain balance and provide locomtion.
Now that's a bit of an overstatment, but it's important to get people to stop believing the notion that a walk cycle is about animating your legs. That's the wrong place to focus. It's why so often you see animations of a perfectly upright and robotic upper torso merely moving in a perfectly straight line, no hip or torso motion up or down, no twisting, no motion other than a straight line in the direction of motion. It's the legs that always get animated.
Here is a short video that goes through some principles of animation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcryIdriSe4
If the link doesn't work for some reason, try searching for:
youtube 12 principles of animation
by mustard creative agency
"The 12 principles of animation were introduced by Disney's animators, Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, in their book 'The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation'. Published in 1981, it is widely considered to be the best animation book of all time."
Now, all we've done so far is briefly discuss some of the elementary basics of walking.
Real animation of characters involves expression and emotion. It's about getting your characters to tell a story. Well, for most animators that's what it's about. But this discussion isn't for those who just want to play with software, its for those who want to tell a story thru animation.
So the real challenging area of animation is understanding people, their physical expressions, their facial expressions, their tendencies, their movements. It's all very very very subtle stuff that means something to viewers. Like a sideways glance can speak volulmes about what the character is thinking. Or a raised eyebrow. Or a slouch. And so on.
Now, for those who always need to turn the discussion to how awesome Carrara is for everything....
You can do all of this in Carrara. Everything. It has some nice tools, and it's lacking other tools. But a skilled animator can produce incredible things in Carrara. It all depends upon skill and talent. And patience.
The only problem with Carrara, or any other software, is this:
HOW MUCH OF THE GRUNT WORK, ALSO CALLED "NO ADDED VALUE" WORK, DOES CARRARA DO FOR YOU SO YOU DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME?
Some would say that in some areas it has some time-saving and efficient tools, and in other areas the artist has to do a lot of grunt work that does nothing to improve the overall quality of the final product. It's just painstaking work that could be better performed by a computer. It's like of Photoshop didn't have a "color range" selection tool. Yeah, you can painstakingly select all areas of a certain color range without it, but it would just take a lot of time. And that work does NOTHING to improve the quality of your work. It's just "grunt" work.
All software has tool limitations. Get over it. That's lilfe.
One of those references that is always cited here, but not much more discussion other than people referring to it.
It would be nice to see a challenge one of these days where some people who actually read and study the introductory basics like this apply it in one of the regular challenges. Maybe a community animation challenge to see how people utilize these principles in their animations.
You could even use cows if that helps.
Okay , here is a little video clip showing how I set up the Genesis figure in Carrara . Sooo... if everyone who participates here sets up the Genesis figure in a similar manner then the shared NLA clips should work for everyone.
http://youtu.be/k5MPNnafaGw
One other area that you will encounter in character animation, and I alluded to it a few times already, is the complexity issue. By definition, a character rig has a ton of variables. Each bone or object has 3 rotation values and 3 translation values, as well as a bunch of other things available to animate.
However, in practice, you only need to change a few of those things in your animation. And the goal is to make the number of things you have to animate be as minimal as possible.
However, with the base Carrara configuration, such as the Sequencer and Graph Editor, you have hundreds or thousands of variables to work with. Which is good in terms of flexibility, but difficult in terms of management.
So the goal is to limit the things your animating to be as few as possible. And some apps make that even easier by allowing you to select those features you want to animate, out of the hundreds of choices, and quickly make a simple control panel with sliders for only those variables, right on your animation display. A bit like Carrara's parameters dials, but far simpler.
So for example, for a given character you might only want access to the XYZ transformations for the two feet and two arm goals, full control of the hip bone, and that's it. So you just select those 5 items and you instantly have a see-thru panel over your animation display with sliders (or other controls) for those variables. That way you only have to worry about a few variables.
That is a good concept to strive for, especially with complex character animations. Designate and focus on the fewest number of elements to actually animate. Otherwise it's too easy to end up with thousands of unnecessary keyframes on stuff you don't care about, and suddenly your animation is a mess.
I also mentioned an "expressions" feature, where you can set up, say, the hip bone translation to stay at the mid-point of the location of the two feet goals so that the torso is always balanced between the feet, or any number of other automated tasks you generally use in your character animations. These animation tools are extremely useful in making the process much less painful. However, you can still accomplish all of this without those tools. It's just a lot easier with those tools. And knowing about them can be useful if you need to decide what toolsets you need for your particular workflow.
Does Genesis not already have IK chains set up for the legs and arms? With the old V4's and others you just select, say, the foot and under Modifiers it already has the IK chain and you just tell it what null object to target.
Here are a couple of youtube Carrara tutorials related to animation. The first starts with the absolute most basics, and is a good introduction to the animation tools in Carrara. The application is to a figure made up of primitives. Note - it is aimed at beginners, so the actual animation discussion of tweeners, etc. doesn't really start until after the 5 minute mark.
Barbara Bastrop
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwSYoQHGf-Q
And the second goes into much more detail with specific application to animating models of humans in Carrara. This includes not only Carrara's tools but also where to find free motion caps and other related information.
Steve of SciFi funk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgghIY3Q7Ic
Thanks, Mike. I have set up a genesis figure according to your video.
http://youtu.be/k5MPNnafaGw
Hopefully, I will get a chance to participate in some of these exercises and share NLA clips. Can we now share Carrara files on the new forum?
Superdog said
"observing human movement is very useful but there is a gap between doing this and harnessing animation tools to recreate it convincingly."
You can create an "Animation rig" by creating Target Helper objects and then Parenting or Grouping those individual controls into another main controller,
A simple example would be an eye rig,. Two target helpers (one for each eye to "point at", and Both helpers are then parented to a single helper object which allows you to control the motion of both eyes by moving a single object.
"CGI is used in films more and more to replace actors in certain scenes such as dangerous or impossible stunts, crowd scenes or, sadly, to replace an actor who has died before production has finished. It's an area of animation that I want to become more skilled at. "
There's more than just the "Animation" , or Physical simulation of a 3D model to achieving that.
You'd use Motion tracking and Rotoscoping and custom texturing to add an image, or sequence, of your real actors head to the animated/simulated model.
Pepsi "Glue Boy" is a nice little example of how a physical simulation is applied to a 3D model, then composited with other footage in a video editor
https://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?fr=mcafee&type=C111GB0D20140703&p=pepsi+glue+boy
Hope it helps
They seem to work nice, but how are they different in results from Faba's Genesis IK helpers, somehow a little more complex, which can be retrieved at:
http://www.sharecg.com/v/58780/gallery/3/PDF-Tutorial/Carrara-Helpers-and-Modifiers-for-Genesis
I haven't had time to check out all the helpful info but have watched the sitting excersize and will learn more about IK helpers. Also watched the Pepsi boy tech video and would love to own Endorphin but they don't seem to sell it on their website. It probably costs thousands anyway. I wonder if there's a cheaper equivilant? I'm focusing on finishing a project for a show and can't participate in much else at the moment. The info so far has been very helpful in speeding things up and getting better results. Once I've got this out the way I'll be able to participate more.
While looking for an alternative to Endorphin which is no longer available I found Smartbody:
http://smartbody.ict.usc.edu/
It's free but unfortunately needs to be compiled before it can be installed apparently. But it alledgedly works with any characters as long as you input where the figures joints are in the program. If someone knew how to compile it then maybe we could have physics for DAZ figures? The guy who helped design it was made into an avatar by NVidia.
http://www.arishapiro.com/
Okay, just testing to see if I can upload a file, this file contains a cube which acts as a seat or chair as well as an NLA clip of the character sitting down. This seat is in the right position for the genesis figure if you double clicked the genesis icon to load it into the scene. This NLA clip can be a starting point for our exercise, just drag the NLA clip from the Clip folder to the NLA track of the Genesis figure.