Week 8 – Week 14 | 10/06/25 – 22/07/25
Emily Soh Ching-Ling | 0359478
Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Creative Media
Advanced Animation | Section 01 | GCD61604
Final Project — Action Animation
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1.0 LECTURES
2.0 INSTRUCTIONS
3.0 FINAL PROJECT — ACTION ANIMATION
Instructions:
3.1 PROGRESS
Research & Storyboard
Figure 3.1-1: Reference — Spear Attack, Week 8 (10/06/26)
Figure 3.1-2: Reference Study, Week 11 (01/07/26)
Figure 3.1-3: Storyboard, Week 11 (05/07/26)
I found this spear attack reference from the YouTube channel Motion Actor Inc. I like the aggressiveness, the pacing, and the mid-air attack. In my rendition, I made the starting and ending pose more confident by having the character stand up straight instead of hunched over.
Blocking
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| Figure 3.1-4: Attaching Prop to Character, Week 11 (05/07/26) |
Since my storyboard calls for a spear, I downloaded this spear model from BlendSwap and parented it to the character's dominant (right) hand using the "Child Of" Object Constraint. Although the character also manoeuvres the spear with his left hand, the left hand primarily acts as secondary action and changes poses often, which is why I didn't parent the spear to it.
Figure 3.1-5: Blocking — With No Timing, Week 13 (17/07/26)
In hindsight, I think there could be more more breakdown poses, particularly between Poses #6 and #12 (refer to Reference Study).
Figure 3.1-6: Blocking — With Timing — Pass #1, Week 13 (19/07/26)
I am not too good at estimating the right timing for animations. To counter this, I opened the reference video in a video editing software so that I can get the exact number of frames for each pose and copied the timing.
Since I used a combination of FK and IK for the legs, the animation broke apart at the switches when I changed the timing. The monstrosity above is the result of many hours of fixing the FK/IK switching issues + adding timing.
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Figure 3.1-7: Poses #8 & #9, Week 13 (21/07/26) |
Figure 3.1-8: Blocking — With Timing — Pass #2, Week 14 (23/07/26)
For the 2nd pass, I focused solely on the character's legs, since that was causing the most problems. This included adjusting the IK knees direction because some of it wasn't keyed properly, causing the knees to not move in the right direction.
As seen in the 1st pass, the character was spinning wildly between Poses #8 and #9, likely because there's not enough key poses.😅 To fix this, I added an extra key pose to smooth out the transition between Pose #8 and Pose #9.
The ending pose where the character straightens himself also had some twisting at the waist. I realised it was because I set the rotations back to 0 (which is the default standing pose) rather than manually rotating the character into place, which caused Blender to add additional spinning. I redid the waist rotation keyframe of the ending pose, which fixed the issue.
Figure 3.1-9: Blocking — With Timing — Pass #3, Week 14 (25/07/26)
My 3rd pass at blocking is to fix the arms and improve on the timing. The arms had the same spinning problem with the legs; fixed it the same way. I focused on increasing the timing between certain poses so that they read clearer and look more realistic, given the already short timeframe; for example: the character gets longer Overshoot and Settle landing poses (Poses #12-13) as he is recovering from the impact, instead of immediately standing up.
Staging Camera
Figure 3.1-10: Staging Camera, Week 14 (25/07/26)
I did the camera staging before doing the expressions so that it was easier to determine where the character was looking at. I wanted to give the viewer a sense of excitement and danger, which is why I positioned the camera at the end of the spear whenever the character finishes an attack move.
Polishing
Figure 3.1-11: Expressions & Polishing, Week 15 (27/07/26)
With the timing in place, I used the Graph Editor to adjust the ease in and ease out, added follow-through for the left arm and spear near the end, and gave the character facial expressions.
Layout Design & Further Adjustments
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| Figure 3.1-12: Garage Environment, Week 15 (28/07/26) |
For the layout, I wanted an urban indoors environment to fit the gritty action scene, like something you would see in a movie training montage. I downloaded this free garage model as the back-drop and this Abandoned Workshop HDRI to light up the scene.
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| Figure 3.1-13: Camera Clipping Through Environment, Week 15 (28/07/26) |
Unfortunately, I didn't realise that the camera was underground for parts of the animation, causing it to clip through and show the underside of the garage. I redid those parts and kept it as similar as possible to the original camera staging.
Figure 3.1-14: Final Animation, Week 15 (29/07/26)
This is the final animated sequence. I adjusted the lighting, contrast, and saturation in CapCut.
3.2 FINAL SUBMISSION
Figure 3.2-1: Final Project — Compilation (Final Submission), Week 15 (29/07/26)
4.0 REFLECTION
I've complained enough about IK/FK and animations breaking apart in my blog already, so in this section, I'll reflect on my overall thoughts for this module.
One thing I want to note is the difference in challenges when it comes to animating in 2D VS 3D. While animating in 2D is laborious due to having to draw each individual frame, the closeness in which you are working with the animation forces you to notice discrepancies which are easy to miss otherwise. While I enjoy the convenience of letting the software take on most of the burden of in-betweening, it gets hard to notice the unnaturalness of certain movements because the heavylifting has been relegated to Blender.
Throughout the semester, I had to fight the mindset that "it looks uncanny now because I haven't adjusted the graphs, it will look better later", because more often than not, there is a problem with the key poses/in-betweens and no amount of fiddling with the Graph Editor will solve it. And by the time I reach the polishing stage, I will be so accustomed to the jankiness that it ends up looking natural in the moment, causing my animation to suffer.
5.0 FURTHER READING
5.1 WEEK 8 — ANIMATING WITH IK & FK
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| Figure 5.1-1: Animating with IK and FK by Sir Wade Neistadt |
Reference: Sir Wade Neistadt. (2017, December 4). Animating with IK and FK. YouTube. https://youtu.be/p6PYKyxR0aY?si=zZIqhxKv1Lv6t3QI.
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