flex off: the art of overbending

If there’s something I like about animating, it’s that you can turn a simple movement into something with personality. Even if I got the inspiration for my character from an actual human being, I would amplify specific behaviours and create a totally new and different character.

everyone, meet chad!

backstory

Self-centred, self-contained, and a little bit of a jerk, really. The kind of lad that would make you choose the bear in the woods. Arrogant and self-confident, the world revolves around him, offensive and outrageous but fragile. Born in an upper-class family, Chad grew up to be an overachiever. As you may imagine at this point, head of Jocks, man of the year and frat boy, cruising through life without a care in the world

walk cycle

audio

Before starting to animate, I wanted to focus on highlighting the character’s rhythmic timing. For this reason, I added the soundtrack to my project by clicking the right mouse button on the timeline and selecting the audio file directly from the audio subfolder I created in the Maya project folder.

After the reference video analysis I used as inspiration for my project, I noticed some peculiarities in the way the actor walks. Starting with the repeated use of arcs and following with the swinging of the hips, during which he visibly lifted the leg of the foot used in the passing pose and right before contact. Therefore, I enhanced his movements by accentuating the curves of the arcs.

Bending

Another important detail was that while usually it is the torso leading the movement, this time it was the pelvis instead, and this gave me enough room to exaggerate this trait by bending backwards even more the character’s upper body.

After some feedback on the progression of the animation, I was notified about a certain rigidity involving mostly the head. So I updated the animation by tilting it slightly to the side, and then I added a back-and-forth movement that followed the timing of his body. It still looked odd, so I introduced the principles of overlap and follow-through by moving the animated frame range a few frames earlier. The animation was progressing fine but there was still something missing. For this type of personality, I couldn’t possibly leave out the facial movement. Even if minimal, I had the character wink at random intervals but still following the overall feel and timing.

Post infinity cycles

Once every pose, breakdown, and the starting pose mirror table was saved in the studio library, I used TweenMachine to create the in-betweens from the main poses to the breakdowns and vice versa. Following a Maya progressive walk tutorial online, I used the same technique he used, to measure the exact distance between the character’s feet and subsequently , moving it forward to animate the root controller

Now for the delicate part: polishing the animation in the graph editor and setting up the post-infinity loop. Luckily, keyframes didn’t require too much work, but I had to pay attention to what type of cycle I would use. For a general animation that doesn’t require movement in space, standard pre and post-infinity loops can be used to cycle the animation. But when the character is actually moving in space? Is where a post-infinity with offset is used instead of the standard one but only applied to the root controller. This happens because it is not only moving in place but also moving forward. Initially, I had his feet slightly sliding, an issue that I solved by carefully revisiting the distance between the character’s feet and adjusting it accordingly.