The Way Of A Monk

The Start

I'm currently in my fourth term of studying 3D animation at PIXL VISN. This term the school gave us a new challenge called "production training". We had three weeks in total to work on one out of four different project choices and as an animator I chose "environment with animation". The given theme was "Fantasy House". 

At first this project was just planned as an exercise to improve my understanding of complex body mechanics. I also wanted to try out a rather exaggerated cartoony style of animation. I've put a lot of work and passion into this animation. Growing up with "Avatar: the last airbender" I have a deep rooted love for the series. Therefore it was very exciting bringing Aang to live!

Planning

I started searching for reference of difficult and acrobatic jumps, when I stumbled upon the video from "Kojostricklab" on Instagram. It was the perfect exercise for flips which have proven to be challenging for me in the past. I also saw potential to implement overly exaggerated stretching in my animation. 

Seeing the potential of the first, I started looking for another reference to complete the shot. I wanted to keep Aangs personality and animate something only he would be able to perform. Looking at the iconic opening shot of ATLA, it was an immediate fit for me. I found a similar reference to the famous "airball scene" from the intro from "yaeh okay" on YouTube.

Animation

I feel most comfortable going with the Pose-to-pose workflow. I started with the hips and made sure they were correct on every key pose. It was important to get the right feeling for them early on. After that, I finished up the key poses for the rest of the body using the hip controller as the base.

The first reference lives from its momentum so it was mandatory to get the arcs of all limbs right. Otherwise it would have been tough to convey the feeling of gravity in my animation. To visualize the arcs I used the motion trail function from Animbot as well as SyncSketch to track the arcs of the reference and my animation simultaneously. 

Speaking of Animbot and SyncSketch, they were the biggest help for this project. Animbot gives me lots of useful tools to organize, improve and fasten up my workflow. In the past I dealt with some obstacles regarding the FK/IK switches for example. With the key coloring feature this problem vanished. All my FK/IK switches are colored in yellow keys to keep track of them. SyncSketch on the other hand was essential for getting feedback from my mentors and fellow colleagues.

I had immense timing issues with the first reference. It included slow motion, which had to be corrected for the final animation to keep up the momentum. It was challenging but I'm happy with how it turned out in the end.

I went a little overboard with the magnified stretching. Naturally, with stretching followed overlapping action. In combination with the weight I was able to achieve a more stylized animation.

Future plans

I will continue to work on this project to polish it even more and use it for my Demo Reel. My plan includes adding another sequence of Aang colliding with something in the background after re-entering the scene. 

- Lauren