Humans are moving into the garden to make it (because it is) a better place -.-
I’m making all those human moves these days. Basically several clips that are in the same crowd or sharing the similar poses in one fbx file. Like I now have 10 clips in the ‘sit’ model, 11 clips in the ‘standing’ model, and 4 clips in the ‘carrying’ model. Although they use the same armature, since in the Unity scene they would have the identical pose which is the first frame of the first clip in NLA editor, then it would be very hard to adjust their transformations and parent-child relationships if I just used one model.
Making armature animations is fun. (The disgusting part is weight painting though – since I had more poses than just riding now, I’d found the weights were not that right at the hip part and it took me a whole afternoon to repaint it, to ‘basically right’. See the upper parts of the thigh is still quite weirdly swelling) But if you want to make them moving naturally, then you have to take care of every bone. Walking is obviously much more difficult than sitting, and like how you walk, every bone have to move to make the whole body move naturally, even the toe. Also the centre of gravity is important! The GIF below was initially for carrying a burden, but for quite a long time I felt it had been more like dragging something. I think the most important part for the centre of gravity should be the hip bone (the cyan below) – position as well as rotation.
Below is a combination in the real scene of several animations. The branch is set parent to one hand, and to make it move but not rotate, I have to be very careful with the hand’s bone and set it to the same rotation of every key frame. That was not very easy because the hip the spine the chest and the arm rotates all the time to look natural!
And another combination: the same person with the left one above but this time he is dragging a frog.
This one below contains more parent-child relationships. Actually I quite like this kind of thing because although it seems more troublesome, but once you got clear who will be the child of whom, then after dragging them in, the whole animation would seem quite good because everything seems moving along with each other and that makes the natural sense.
And a sitting crowd here. For a crowd of people like this as well as those trying to catch the red ball above, the differences between each other are very important. People can’t move with the same rhythm and the same movements. So one thing is to make more clips with maybe just slight differences (like they are all sitting but some are supporting the body with one hand or two, some shaking legs or looking around, etc), and the other thing is to use different speed for each animator controller.
Another thing except from the animation when importing these humans is that new models and textures as most of them have their own stage properties… (That could be another ‘default’ factor of being natural cos it looks that everyone is really doing something..) And here are the big birds in the pond.
I really enjoy the time restoring these adorable creatures by painting new textures, and I try to make them more like birds by adding thin strokes to create a feather-like material but not a colourful plastic. But, well, it’s not a good habit to take screenshots because I always feel that I’ve saved it after I make the screenshot. How much should I pay for my stupidness before I can get a degree?