CoP Creative Response - Keyframe Animation in Maya

Animating the keyframe character was harder that I expected because I had to make the movement look human like and try not to exaggerate the actions too much or else there would be no point in this experiment to see if the Uncanny Valley appears in the movement of a character rather than the look of a character. The whole process took me about a full day to complete, it was a bit stressful at times when the animation wasn't doing what I was wanting it to do and there was a lot of tweaking with the graph editor (this helps smooth out the animation and moves keyframes about) so that the animation looked smooth and not robotic. I think the most stressful and hardest thing I had to do while creating this animation was thinking about timing and placement because thats the key to any good and realistic performance.

This is just a playblast of the keyframed animation and not the real rendered out piece, this is just to show you how I animated the character and to show you the performance with the controllers on. I feel like the performance is good, however there are bits that stick out to me which I'd like to change, for instance the second punch the character makes is a bit slow and I feel like the timing is wrong on it, but it is hard for me to change the keyframes on it without changing all the others after it. The one thing I do like about this is the kick at the end because it look convincing enough and I got the inspiration to do that from the film 300, but it was hard to get the positing or the arms right and to go in time with the kick so that the arms look like they are helping give momentum to the kick.