What is body mechanics?
- What your body is feeling
- How it moves when carrying out a particular action.
How do we use body mechanics in animation?
- To lift
- To jump
What sort of things should we be looking for when animating body mechanics?
- How all parts of the body respond when carrying out an action e.g. Lifting is in the legs but how your hands and facial expressions alter in correlation to the lifting.
- Balance – The weight of a person changes throughout the characters movement. Weight is shifted through the body to keep its balance.
Principles of Body Mechanics:
- Anticipation – Arms before the hulk leaps off .
- Overlap – Spine & arms to keep balance
- Squash & Stretch – When landing
- Timing & Weight – 24 frames per jump to mimic gravity.
- Staging – Water, bridge and post
- Slow in & out – in the jump
- Exaggeration – the landing/arm movement to keep balance
- Appeal –
- Secondary Action – The arms are moving after he lands to keep balance
Good references:
- Parkour/free running
- Takeshi Castle – obstacles
- Total Wipeout
- Ninja Worrier – Makoto
Really loved the idea of parkour as my body mechanics reference. I watched this whole video and thought it was pretty impressive. I really don’t like when parkour is super dangerous so liked the water element just in case. Also this group of people seem like a real nice group of friends and the energy is great!
I decided to edit in Adobe After Effects the part of the clip I wanted to animate as there are so many jumps through out the video.
My Video Reference:
So to get started I needed to break down all the main block poses which I did on Adobe Illustrator.
Block poses from the jump reference:
Block Poses from the dive reference:
For my rig I chose to use The Incredible Hulk. This wasn’t the most complex of rigs but I liked that the idea of making a bulky character also a balances and skilled parkour jumper. The concept is amusing and playful.
Hulk’s Blocking Poses:
From screenshooting the block poses it was much easier for me to track the reference to get the right block poses and timing.
First Playblast:
I really enjoyed making this animation. I think it was really exciting making him jump like the video. The reference was so much easier than the stylised walk reference. I think this made a huge difference in how easier and how much more enjoyable it can be. The energy in the video definitely helped with the excitement of the hulk jumping like he is.