8- Anatomy and Posing
Anatomy and Posing
You can see that I made a skeleton of my character.
Kind of funny, huh? Do you know why that’s helpful? Look at the legs and arms, at the hips and ribs. When you think about what’s inside your character, you are able to better understand how it might move.
I have made two poses: casting a spell and walking. Understanding your character’s body is important in learning how to move it. Casting a spell means holding up the stick, but you may not have noticed that I slightly tilted his head back.
In the walking pose, you can see that I bent the legs where the joints are on the skeleton. He’s also leaned forward to show motion and his tail is straighter because he’s moving.
Learning animation techniques is a lot of work but the most important thing to understand is this: details are important! Take your time and pose your character to get a feeling for it. This is where Grouping the arm and leg pieces comes in handy.
Resources:
Older games used very little animation so they emphasized movement by using Key frames. This is a good introduction to that concept, especially in the world of video games.
Your character may not be quite as boxy as mine. Much of posing can be understood in the curving of a line. Check this video out to see how.
In understanding the posing of your character, it might be helpful to go back to paper. Drawing is faster and you can learn a lot more quickly. Once you find a look that you like, less time is wasted on the computer.
Assignment
Either on Vectr or paper, draw the skeleton of your character and at least 3 poses from the following list:
- Attack
- Duck
- Jump
- Run
- Walk
- Sneak
- Shoot