Now that we are nearing the end of the project, this week was all about cleaning up the body data. I started where I left off last week - working on the feet.
Admittedly, I had some issues with using animation layers at first which annoyed the heck out of me. It took me ages to figure out that I needed to have a zeroed out keyframe set before I made a change because otherwise the changes I made would apply to the whole animation. Due to my frustration I just decided to edit the original base animation.
First of all I selected a frame where each foot is flat on the floor. On those frames I solidified the values as my reference to replicate whenever the feet were meant to be flat.
I worked on Miri's left foot first. In the image below you can see how the right foot (red) is floating in comparison to the left (green).
Another issue I ran into was that because I had moved the floor down from the 0 axis line based on my first frame, the later animation was all floating above the floor. It appeared my data was inconsistent and so I decided to re-adjust the floor and therefore the beginning frames of my animation before I got any further.
I completed locking down both feet in between Miri's steps.
At this point I wasn't worried about the foot roll so I ended up making a lot of vertical adjustments to the x axis curves because the foot being flat meant the heel would penetrate the ground. (Honestly this decision would bite me in the ass later on in the cleanup but it's fineeeee).
This video shows the result of my foot flattening work. If you look closely on the left view, you can see that as she lifts her feet before she takes a step, her whole foot remains rigidly flat so the whole foot has to lift as one. In reality, when we take a step our ankle leaves the ground first, rolling up as the toes remain flat until the last second.
Now for the body cleanup. My animators brain really enjoyed this process since I like tidying animation curves in the graph editor.
Dr Kennedy mentioned it is wise to work from the control with the most influence to the least influence. I find this is the case for most rigs in animation. For this reason, I started with the hip control and worked my way up the spine to the shoulders, arms, wrists, neck and head. I also looked at cleaning up the remaining keys on the foot controls because I had only been paying attention to locking down the steps until now.
Once again I made the most of buffer curves for this process.
The controls were a bit different to the usual axis rotations. In this case:
Translate x: up and down
Translate y: forward and back
Translate z: side to side
For the most part, the data was fairly consistent but there were some irregular spikes as pictured below which I went through and smoothed out.
I had to be careful with my smoothing as sometimes it could change the overall feel of the movement too much.
In other areas where smoothing didn't make a lot of change (for example, when the irregularity was as small as a hundredth if a value), I didn't worry as much for the sake of time efficiency.
When I was satisfied with the body cleanup, I added in the audio file to the timeline as well as exported my reference video out as an image sequence using Premiere Pro.
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