Self Study 2 -- Bones, Rigging, and Animation

The second self study module for this unit was about learning about bones, rigging and 3D animation, which was the logical next from last week's modelling and texturing module.

The first task of the module was to model a 3D humaniod character that would be rigged and animated, I'm still a super novice at blender and 3D modelling so in the end I decided it'd be the most beneficial for me to follow a tutorial on how to model a simple humanoid character. The tutorial I followed for modelling a character was 

This video was insanely helpful to someone like me who barely knew what they were doing, as the guy talking was very easy to understand and always mentioned what key presses were used and when. After many struggles I finally managed to end up with something vaguely human-like:

With a humanoid character now modelled, it was time to start the process of rigging! Since the tutorial mentioned previously was part of a series, I watched and followed along with the next part in the series to learn the process of rigging a model 

Overall it wasn't an overly complex task for most of the rigging process, though the tutorial explained and went through how to add Inverse Kinematics (IK) to the feet to allow them to have smoother movement which was probably the most complex part of it all. Once the rigging was complete, our guy now has a full skeleton to be used to animate his future movements!

Once the rigging was done I moved onto the part I may have been dreading the most: which was animating! Like the last two sections I roughly followed along with a tutorial to learn the process of animation in blender, though I strayed away from the tutorial once I got my bearings a bit

In the end it turned out fine enough I suppose, though I really think there's a lot that could've been done to improve it, stuff like more dynamic movement and properly looping the animation would probably have gone a long way in improving the quality of the animation. Not bad for a first try at 3D animation though! 

Next I took the plunge into madness and tried my hand at a simple walk animation, and if the horrors of 3D animation hadn't already revealed themselves to me before, they sure did now!!

While the walk cycle works fine enough overall, it was a challenge to make something that felt like the character was walking but also trying to keep it in relatively the same place, since I don't feel it wouldn't look very nice in-game if the player wandered away from their center pivot point often!! Other than that it was just a challenge to create a walk cycle in general, since even something as simple as two steps has a TON of body motion and minor details put into it that you wouldn't notice unless you're an animator or looking at someone walking really closely. 

Lastly, but certainly not least I created a simple "waving" animation to round out the collection, after the beginners traps I fell into with idle and the insanity that was walking, the wave animation almost felt too easy to do!

I finally managed to get an animation with a somewhat decent looking loop and body pose and all without too much hassle all things considered. Overall I'm pretty happy with how this anim ended up turning out, even if it is pretty basic and straight forward.

The big takeaway I learnt from all of this is that people who do 3D models and 3D animations must have some sort of secret(s) that I don't know about because this seems like it'd be a nightmare to do more often! But it also put into perspective how impressive it all is in the first place, which I feel like makes me appreciate the art form more than I did before