Week 3+4: Weight

Next on the schedule was the weight-assignment. For this week the goal was to focus on implementing the illusion of gravity and weight into our animations. We needed to make three sequences, one with a figure lifting a box, one where it's pushing a box and one pulling a box.

We started out taking out a big box and a camera, and started lifting and pulling to get a feel of the movement we were trying to create. This was helpful, but I didn't end up using any of the photos we took. I went on pretty much straight forward and started animating in flash. I wanted to have all of the sequences in one continuous clip, so I went for a person picking up a fat dog, placing it on a table and pushing it off of it again. Here's an early version with only keyframes, and missing the pushing-action.

I continued cleaning this animation up, and to stay within the deadline I settled with a sketchy style. It's not as clean as the quadruped locomotion-animation, but for this I was focusing on getting the movement right before I ran out of time.

The end result I got ended up looking quite rough, and I didn't get the time to add inbetweens for some parts. However all in all I'm happy with the movement, the timing was tricky to get right in this one and I don't think I succeeded as much as I'd like to, but overall it works well. Animations can always be better, but I'm pleased with the sense of weight and movement I ended up with.