While I thinking about the storyboard, I made a change for the soundtrack.
I was going to make 2 fight scenes for each dragon, because I felt at the 1:00 is the demarcation point of the soundtrack. I can feel the first part is a skirmish. Next starting from 1:00 to 1:20 is a transitional part where tension builds up. Then last part from 1:20 to 2:20 is a boss fight. That’s what I feel about the soundtrack. But now I need to make some changes, because I need to save my time and try to focus onn one main fight scene, so I cut the first part and start from 1:00, diretly to the boss fight after the short prelude. So now the length of the soundtrack is 1 minute and 22 second.
I keep running through the storyline on my mind, try to arrange the fights accoording to the soundtrack. The story is very simple, this samurai girl is a dragon slayer, who kills a wyvern and tries to leave. But there is bigger and angry dragon comes out and stop her way, then they start the fight.
For saving the time, I skip the part of making the storyboard and jump directly to the previs part. When I’m doing my personal work I use to start from the most important part. For this animation I want to make a long take shot to show the fighting. How to desgin this shot will be the most important part.
My idea is to let the dragon roars to her and blows her away, then she runs to it and start the fight.
The dragon stops her way and stares at her.
It stands up.
It roars and blows her away.
There is a stone behind her.
She falls down on the ground.
She turns her body and push the ground.
She pushes herself to the air and tries to use the sowrds to slows her down.
Then she jumps to air and do a backflip.
At the time she drops on the ground, she see a big fire ball flies to her.
She dodges it and runs toward the dragon.
Then she will dodge more fire ball attacks and start the fight. But I stop here, because I think this part are quite long I might need some changes in the future. Also my tutor Alan needs me to show the whole story first otherwise people won’t know what is going on in my animation. Therefore, I will start form the beginning to make a rough previs and try to make the story clear.
In the period of making this part, I have met some problems.
- The Ik and FK matching.
Because this animation involves a lot of extreme moves like spins, jumps, and backflips, the IF and FK matching are important. But I have found some tools which will be very easy to deal with that. The advanced skelecton has its own matching tool. Michael Cuevas have wrote a IKFK script for every Kiel Figgins’s rig, the samurai girl I bought is from his store. Also there is a tool call ‘Universal IK FK Switch and Match Tool’ which can be using for almost every rig.
2. The gimbal lock.
The gimbal lock in maya can be cause serious problems of the animation. I didn’t notice that before until I making this animation in my FMP. Especially happening a lot on the upper arms, leg and waist, it will cause them to move in a strange arc. It’s easier to see the problems with more extreme moves. I tried to fix that with Euler filter but it doesn’t always work.
So I only have two solutions for that. The first one is make the decision of the rotaion order before doing the animation. For example like XYZ, X controls nothing, Y controls X and Z controls XY. So the axis that you use a lot should be put it in the first order. The axis that you barely use should be in the second order. The second solution is do the keyframes to the rotaion order. You can change it according to the animation but just need to be carefull with the transition.
Link to this part: