Animation​

Animation Experimentation with Kitsune

Following on from the crit, I decided to try and animate the characters with simple movements. I was suggested by a peer to use mixamo to animate the characters as it would auto rig the characters. As I only wanted to apple simple animation not he characters such as breathing I thought that this would be a good idea. However, I found that mixamo only imports low poly models and could recognise the high poly model. below is a few examples of animations that maxim produced from a low poly version of my character. 

When I completed the modelling of my characters I used the auto rig tool to produce a simple rig for them. As the models are quite high poly I found that Maya was very unresponsive so I was unable to auto-rig the characters till I had access to the animation suite at university. The authoring only works on humanoid characters so I was unable to rig the tail with the body.

 

The Idle Stance 01 (Assetstore.unity.com, 2019) is the mobcap that I will be using to apply onto my character. In order to apply the mobcap animation to the rig the bones of the mobcap needed to be defined so that the animations on each bone can translate to the Kitsune rig.  I applied the mobcap animation to the characters rig by selecting the imported character in the source of the Kitsune’s character controls. Below you can see how the Kitsune mirrors the imported mobcaps animation. 

I found that moving the rig distorted the model itself, especially when the mobcaps were applied to the models. However, the disfiguration on the Kitsune is mainly on the legs and side of the head. The areas on the body can be covered with the clothing. However, the ear and hair are quite noticeable on the Kitsune character. I will combat this by using mocaps with little to no moment, to minimise the breaking of the mesh. If the disfiguration is too noticeable I will be presenting the characters in T-poses, as it would be better to present high-quality work rather than something that doesn’t look professional. 

Animation With Tanuki

For the Tanuki I auto rigged the character in Maya and also found that it would rig the tail. However, because of the proportions of the character, the historians were quite bad. The control rig would stretch out the character and completely break the mesh. In addition to this, when I applied a mobcap I found from mixamo the rig was still distorted which can be seen below. Due to this, I will not be animating this character because I wouldn’t be able to disguise the distortion with clothing like I would be Abel to do with the Kitsune.