![]() In order for the animation to be as accurate as possible, I wanted to
follow the movement demonstrated in the video clips as much as possible,
even if I needed to use bits of many clips to get the one continuous action
I wanted.
Walking animation:
The neck of the bear is quite long so that heavier back half of the bear is balanced. This length means that there is a slight bounce of the neck as the bear walks along. It was quite important to add this into my animation, as it was a vital clue as to the weight of the animal. The speed of the bear as is walks had to be taken into consideration,
as I wanted to get across the weight of the animal in its movement. My
first attempt at animating the walk resulted in a movement that was too
slow, and made the bear look as if it was old and was having difficulty
supporting itself. After speeding up the walk to a pace more in line with
the evidence on the video, the bear movement became much more realistic.
I had left the foot rolling part of the front legs as an animation decision
when I built the model for the bear. So when I came to making the feet
roll, I decided that the best way to represent the movement was simply
to pull the foot block of my bear back and to the side, then up and Once I had made my polar bear walk along as part of my sequence, I needed it no bend to look at something on the ground. To achieve this I had to pull my model into quite a drastic position. This caused a lot if the blocks to cut through each other in ways that would not happen in real life. This was, however, the point of using parented blocks rather than deforming skin, as this meant that I did not need to change my animation to prevent these intersections. There were a few problems with the legs bending in the wrong directions when the model was bent in such a way, but nothing that couldn't be easily sorted with a little tweaking. So otherwise, if the blocks intersected drastically, I did not worry about it as long as it did not detract form the animation. I had intended for the animation to end with the bear turning back up from its stoop and walking away, but once I had got the model to bend in such a way, it was difficult to get the model to revert back to walking. I could not get the back legs to move behind the bear as it stooped to look at the ground as the front and back legs would always intersect in a way that even a blocky model could not hide. The animal itself bends its body out of the way in a way that my model was not able to do. Once I could not move the legs around, getting the rest of the body to revert back to the walk would have looked unnatural, and would have involved trying to guess how the bear might stand back up without having any real material to back up. Being as I did not want any animation that was not based on anything I could study, I decided to have the bear look up at the end instead of walking on. Hunting Animation:
As the listening operation is such a delicate one for the bear, I needed to slow its animation right down to give the impression of careful concentration. The wobble of the under side of the bear was also less important, as the slow movements keep the wobble down to a minimum. What was more important, however, was the neck movement. The bear cranes its neck around to try and catch the scent and/or sound of the seal, and so this would be the greatest movement the bear would be making with its body. Once the bear had established that there was a seal under the ice, I
needed my bear to sit back onto its hind legs before deciding where to
finally pounce. To do this, the bear pulls all its legs underneath itself
before raising its front legs. Unfortunately, the inverse kinematics on
the front legs of my model meant that the action achieved was a little
unnatural where the paws gave an impression of leading themselves rather
than the lifting of the shoulders pulling them up. To combat this, I animated
the paws swinging a little more than they did in the video clips to stop
them looking too static.
To animate the actual lunge of the bear through the ice, I looked at
the different clips I had of real bears taken from different angles. What
became apparent from looking at these, is that each jump is quite individual
and only shares basic characteristics with other attempts. The When the bear breaks through the ice in my animation, I simply let the
bear disappear through the ground. I could have made a hole for the bear
to fall through, but from the videos it was apparent that the ice is covered
in such a thick layer of snow, the bear does just disappear from the shoulders
up once it has dived. As the bear disappears further into the ice at the
end of the animation, I simply moved the bear down through the ground.
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