Hook Toss Animation

This is another one of my shorter scenes, but it is arguably the most dynamic and action packed one. Unlike all of my other scenes, this one focuses heavily on action shots and walk cycles, including a skipping cycle from Seed, the yellow yarnball. Walk cycles can be tricky, and getting a skipping cycle ended up being even more difficult. You don't think much about skipping and its complexities untill you suddenly have to get a character to move like that. 

I wanted to make Seed bouncy and fun, while also making it feel like the physics of the world were still affecting him, if that makes any sense. My first attempt at a skip cycle was jenky, and it felt way too realistic and not emphasized or dramatic enough. I also don't think I did a very good job getting the timing right on it, so it just seemed odd. It was the work in progress I had of that scene for a very long time while I figured out how to actually get it to look right. 

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Seed doesn't look like he's interacting with the floor at all in this original pass, and his weight distribution is just weird. It's not bad, for a first attempt at a skip cycle, but I was not happy with this as a final result. At first, I tried to simply tweak the existing animation I had to make it more exaggerated and bouncy. But all that did was pull his leg from his body and stretch his arm the wrong way. Not to mention it somehow looked worse after I tried fixing it. I ended up simply saving a version of that file to a different folder, and completely starting Seed's skip animation over again. 

This time, not only did I look at some real world examples, but I also looked at other animated ones to see what was exaggerated, and what wasn't. It was here where I realized one of my biggest errors, the size and height of Seed's strides. Because everything was so small, it felt less impactful and bouncy, but exaggerating that a large amount caused a very pleasing effect!! I almost went too far in that direction as well though, because Seed already looks like he's semi-floating in the final version, which is just enough of a funny exaggeration to add to the scene, but I had an even more exaggerated version. 

Unfortunately I didn't keep any of the visuals for that specific scene, as I reaized almost immediately that it looked very very weird. But it almost looked as if Seed was on the moon, and if he bounced to high he'd just go flying off into space somewhere beyond the camera. While funny to look at, it was not the effect I was going for, so I quickly pulled it back in. A happy medium is where I settled, and I'm quite happy both with the way it turned out, and with the redone weight distribution I did.​