My first inspiration was from the animated show Naruto when he jumps in the air kicking his legs apart with excitement!
one of the many problems i slammed into while animating this jump was that in-between frames the knee joints would often bend inwards and no matter how much in-between frames i would add it would still be there or look incredibly jittery. This was the only real annoyance i had while animating this sequence.
this was a super helpful video where a man studied and replicated the jumps of Naruto which helped me understand the timing and the physics a lot more!
Naruto is a super clumsy character so I made him fall on his butt after he kicks in mid air. I thought this would be an awesome way to show an excited but clumsy character with just a pair of legs!
For the body mechanics test i just did a basic jump and land to see how the rig worked, it was super easy and fun to do. But for some reason the whole model moved down under the graph lines and no matter how much times i tried to bring it back to its original position it wouldn’t work, but after exporting it it still looks pretty good!
as you can see here the feet are below the line.
Conclusion
I thought this assignment was incredibly educational. I didn’t realize how rusty i was with animating until i started doing this assignment! I loved researching different movements from loved animations and applying them to my work! I have faced many problems while doing these two animations and over come most of them, the main thing i take away from doing these two is to save in Maya as often as humanly possible to avoid mental breakdowns, and to look into video tutorials of professionals doing similar projects to help you learn more shortcuts and faster ways of animating! I feel much more confident attempting character animating for the final project of this year after these two leg animations!
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