Character animation

Dear readers,

This week I've been working on character animations for our top secret SSX-with-cars project.

Character animations in 3D are most of the time done by using a relatively simple skeleton, matching the general shape of the character's mesh. These skeletons include all of the important joints that are needed to create the required deformations. The mesh of the character itself is linked to such skeleton. When a bone moves, the related vertices of the mesh move with it. The proces of linking the vertices of a mesh to such a skeleton and the creation of a skeleton itself is called  'rigging'. After the character model is rigged properly, we can animate it.

The animations are created by making keyframes of the skeleton, not the mesh. A keyframe in 3D is basically a pose of the skeleton at a specific time. I always start by creating the most extreme poses of the animation. For example, I was working on an animation where two characters were highfive-ing:

Click to see animated GIF

I created the starting pose and the pose where the two hit eachother with their hands. These two keyframes are seperated by empty frames. The computer calculates the motion between these poses/keyframes. At this point we only have the motion and timing of the animations but it is far from finished. The motions of a bone from one keyframe to another can be displayed by showing its trajectory. These are pretty much straight, from one point in 3D to another. But when having the highfive animation, I want the arms to swing. Therefor I have to adjust the trajectory. This can be done by adding extra keyframes in between. This adjusts the curve of the motion. Most of the time I use only one extra frame, because adding too much frames can cause jittering and unsmooth motion.

- Joep