Rig: Kate McNeely
Textures: Clarisse Chiang
Lighting: Sarah Putka
This is one of the shots I animated on SnowBugs, an indie short film I was animation lead on! In my initial shot assignments, this was one I had to wait until later to work on as the rig was prepared, and I spent spent months mulling it over in my head on how to approach this from a technical standpoint.
Watch the full film here!
Notes:
The first choice was keeping the character and camera relatively stationary in space while moving the snow slope instead. It's supposed to be a very large distance she's covering, so this let me control the animation better. Setting the translation tool to "Object" mode makes this easy peasy!
Next, I needed a system that kept the rotations and translations separate for easy editing. This is the system I eventually came to.
rolyTrans_grp stores the translation keyframes of Rolypoly and everything that attaches to her body through the shot
rolyRot_grp stores the rotation keyframes, parented to that group node are the clumps of snow that pile onto her body (and their deformers), the rig itself, and the snowball model for the switch that happens once she's fully a snowball
ffd5Lattice and sculptor1 are both deformers, and needed to be parented to the translation group to move with the rig
There probably wouldn't have been an issue keeping the translations and rotations on the same control because animating in stepped rarely allows keyframes to be mismatched and she's only rotating on one axis, but keeping these separate was good for my sanity and would be good practice in spline to add another layer of control.
All snow accumulation on her body was accomplished using the basic snowball model and lattice deformers to morph into place around her body, and a sculpt deformer inside of her body to push her geometry out when needed to touch the snow. The snow scatter is that same snowball model scaled and translated around, with a parent constraint to the ground.
Most of the shot is animated on 2's, with two exceptions: the squashed contact pose which lasts for one frame then her hangtime in the air afterwards is extended by one frame. This adds texture to the animation timing. Having her be completely still for three frames would make her feel stuck, however, so her rotation/translation is offset by one frame so that she still has the feeling of moving on 2's.
It was important to pay attention to screen space so that her forward movement would read properly. In the beginning when she's rolling down, she's advanced forward in space slightly to show her picking up speed. Then when she hits the rock and bounces, I made sure she maintains a nice arc while appearing to hit the ground with some force.
To show how fast she was rolling without motion blur, she rotates basically 180 degrees with slight variations each keyframe, except when she hangs in the air. You can see it in the 32-40 area of the graph editor! Otherwise, the steps are all similarly sized.
Overall, I'm still pretty happy with this even if it's deceptively simple. It's basically a ball rolling down a hill, but I felt like I did well to keep the shot organized and want to maintain this level of thought going forward!
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