Research Material
Looked at a variety of different reference material, whilst deciding on what scene i would like recreate with my animation. I looked at some MMA fights but decided that as it would most likely require two characters to look effective I would leave off that for now. Next I decided to look at some step by step martial arts diagrams
This helped me get an understanding of what might entail when it came to animating a kata. Whilst not as effective as copying real life footage for reference it allowed me to see the stances and key poses from different directions and see the motions that would be made when moving from stance to stance.
Planning work
When planning for this project I considered multiple sports that I thought could be interesting to do. Ultimately it came down to figuring skating and martial arts, what tipped it in the end was due to the experience I had prior with animating fight scenes and I wanted to improve on that.
I wanted to do a Kata in the end, the kind of discipline required to perform one is something I thought would be interesting to study and try to recreate with my animation.
The pre vis block out was easy enough to do, simply replicating the stances in the kata was simple, however it the weight and balance of the character moving from stance to stance that would be key to making this animation work well.
Development work
This was certainly the one I spent the most time on for this module I hadn’t considered how long it would take as I had thought it was a fairly simple scene. However there were a variety of quite subtlety movements that were underestimated. The way the martial artist shifts his weight around is a main one, getting that balance and discipline was something I tried hard to catch.
In an early test previz I found that my lines of action were quite different to the reference footage. The martial artist had his chest stuck out which was hard to see through his padded clothing and broad physique when I did the same on Malcolm it looked odd, due how much slimmer he was in build.
After blocking out the animation, the whole thing seemed rather easy though I would later find that Malcolm was not the best rig to use for this kind of animation. As mentioned before he was far too lanky and slender compared to the martial artist I was using as reference who was a lot more broad and built. This resulted in me having to make some edits to Malcolm, making his body wider and arms and legs thicker. Though it worked out in the end it did lead to me having to go back and edit certain keys as Malcolm was not clipping into himself.
In addition there were many parts of the animation in which the martial artist would move with such force his arms with get a form of whiplash. This was another part of the animation I struggled to capture, however after experiment with some layers I would able to get the desired result.
Reflection
After thinking it through I realized that I underestimated this task, whilst I spent most of my time on it I didn’t realize just how long it would take. Getting the weight and force behind each move proved more difficult than I expected and even now I’m not sure I got it how I wanted however it was very interesting to learn, it was my first time using animations layers too so it was nice to use this as an excuse to experiment with parts of Maya I’d previously not utilized.
Acting in animation 