Aim
My main intention with this week’s practice is to rig a character in 2d and 3d and check which one is more efficient to animate. The secondary goal with this practice was creating fluid motion.
Method
I tried to animate the figure using both the techniques, using 3ds Max, and using Rigging Tool in Harmony.
Reflection
I realised that rigging the character finally enabled me to clearly define the positions of the knees, elbows, feet etc. However, I struggled to visualise the next keyframes because I was focusing more on defining positions for each limb.
Rigging in harmony was another challenge for me considering the limited license I had, I could not access the node network and had to find another way to animate the character. I decided to use the peg method in Harmony to animate the limbs and replacing the exposures would give me the jittery effect in the drawing. Animating this way in Harmony was less time consuming compared to 3d.
On the other hand, frame-by-frame animation in Harmony was very flexible and gave me complete freedom to manipulate the overall structure. So, in a way, I was more successful in animating the figure using the traditional frame-by-frame technique and not by rigging the character.
I imported the animated sequence in Unity to check how the animation is played when I press Left/Right buttons to move the character across a hidden wall. I am using the loop of 10 frames for ‘idle’ and ‘moving’ left or right playing with 24 frames per second.
However, when I played everything together, it seemed as if the character was dancing. I realised I need to work on the movement of the hands especially to make them look like they are sort of gliding on the hidden wall and not just waving in the air.
There was another issue with the animation, more of like programming issue in Unity that affected more on the movement of the character. Whenever I pressed either left or right button, the character will play the ‘movement’ sequence once and resume to the ‘idle’ sequence before looping the ‘movement’ again. Due to this, there is a lag in between the ‘movement’ and ‘idle’ sequences, hence it looks like the character is dancing rather than moving across the wall. This is clearly visible when the character is moving right.
I spent another few hours troubleshooting the programing and setting up the mechanism so that it won’t play the ‘idle’ animation in between when I press a button to move the character. Eventually, I concluded that is how Unity plays the animation.
