ACTING & FILM SCHOOL

3D Animation School Student Thoughts

For our 3D Animation group project,  I am doing the character’s motion in a number of scenes and making it realistic.

At the beginning, it is not easy to make the character lifelike. I had to think about which part of body would be affected when the character moves such as walking.

Considering the body’s balance and weight is very necessary for the animation. For instance, I needed to consider the “bounce” when the superhero sits down on the floor. Reference motion is important as a first step, it allowed me to set the animation blocking easily (blocking is setting the initial extremes of movement).

I spent a lot of time studying the movie references for the character as well as continually acting out it out for myself, which is a process of internalizing the characters movement. In this particular scene, the character has had some bad news and slumps down against the car. This is a rough render called a “playblast” in which we can quickly see the the characters movements. These are rough (low polygon) models allowing me to animate the character in real time without the computer lagging and “distorting” the animation.

Pei-Cheng Wu, 3D Animation School Student