Toolkit 2: Maya Pt 4

 Continuing on from the previous Maya session, I developed on my Barbell animation. Now that I had achieved the five key positions, it was time to incorporate some breakdown poses. These breakdown poses help to frame the significant positions in a sequence and create believability. Real-life movement is never sharp and rigid, which is why breakdown poses are used; to ease in and out of  the motions of a movement. 

 

In this first video, I demonstrate  the key poses I constructed in the last session alongside breakdown poses uses for a more effective movement, the animation now has more dimension. The animation is played using a linear format in order to identify the raw key frames. This creates a jittery animation, but allows me to understand the fundamentals of the motion I am working on.

Finally, I work within the graph editor and experiment with clean-up. This process requires me to look at each graph and ensure the keyframes create u-curves or s-curves. This ensures more realistic and readable movement. In this example, I think clean-up did more damage than good. It takes practice to identify whether a graph needs to be cleaned into an S-curve or a U-curve.