Idea

For our cinematic we decided to make some kind of abandon school with traps. Something in style of Indiana Jones. As a reason why 4 kinds end up in abandoned school with traps, I thought about quite popular movement called diggers. People who love adventures and old stuff, get in in old ruins and abandoned places to search for voices of the past, things that will tell the story of long gone days.

In order to include all idles we will make several stages. First our characters are getting in trap and running from the giant spherical rock, just like Jones on the picture above, they get saved because corridor ends, they pass the door but the rock get stuck. This is the first idle-running. Then a bit of space where character will need to walk their way to next obstacles. Here we are planning to make different things like swinging axes, holes with spikes etc.

Something like in First Knight Movie. Weird school, right?

But that will allow us to make idles such as jump, jump over, dodge, roll over or even something like character walking tightly next to the wall. Like in the movies where people get out of the window and try to walk to the next one to get away from bad guys.

Walk animation

When making walk animation I tried to make it show the personality of a character. I wanted this girl to be very confident, possibly a person who is an initiator of the ideas, person who always rush and love adventures. So the walk had to be confident as well. While making this animation I worked by looking what works best, without using numbers. I've been working that way last year so it kind of works for me. Animation is always hard for me because I understand how it must look, and it takes me tones of time to get there, hard to let it go when something is not coming out.

To avoid tic in cycled animation I had to adjust curves in first and last frames. To do that I first had to set it to post and pre infinity.

After that I had to turn on the infinity to see the curves

Rig Selection

I've been looking at some Norman rigs, but they looked very similar to the rig we used last year and I wanted something more organic and interesting, with more personality and without any ball joints. So I decided to go with ELEVEN rig from 11seconds club. It is very easy to move around, and it is very nicely skinned so all the bends are very clean and natural. At the beginning I had problems with selecting and keying controllers. To solve this issue I had to deselect Joints and IK Handles in show menu ( sapce->Show-> ...)

In order to begin working with the rig this action is required in norman rigs as well.