Self Study 2 - Animation

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N64 Man

For this self-study I attempted to model a character following the conventions of how characters were modeled for games like Mario 64 or Zelda Ocarina of Time . That is, building the character out of discrete low-poly segments instead of one larger model. This way there is no mesh deformation (bending the model) to fiddle with because each bone will just be responsible for one whole segment of the character. Each segment of the character is a separate object in blender and started as a cube.

It was this video that clued me in to this technique and gave me an idea of how to achieve this kind of character model. According to blender my N64 man is made up of 548 triangles (Mario in Mario 64 is 752 for comparison).

By following this tutorial and a few others from the same channel, I fitted the model with a skeleton and set up Inverse Kinematics, which reduces the limb animation process to just moving the hands/feet around and the elbows/knees will bend accordingly to accommodate.

In the second gif the bones that no longer need to be interacted with (thanks to Inverse Kinematics) have been made invisible. The bones floating out in the open are targets that dictate which way his knees/elbows will point when they bend.

To create animations, a movement needs to be broken down into its main poses (keyframes). For example in a walk cycle:

Left leg outstretched ahead, right foot behind.
Left foot contacts ground, right foot raises, ready to come forward.
Right leg swinging forward, left foot coming back while contacting ground.
Right leg outstretched, left foot behind.

And so on. A couple more poses and you will have looped back to the start. Once these keyframes are defined, blender can smoothly transition between them to create motion.

Thankfully it's possible to animate one half of the walk cycle (one single step) and copy+paste the keyframes with an automatic horizontal flip to create the step for the opposite foot.

I already have experience with 3D animation so with a bit of time I was able to create these 3 animations: