5. Making Mud Move

 Although I had researched the different methods that I could use to implement my actual geometry manipulation, this left me with the simple problem of trying to make the troop animate with no keyframes or instancing the objects connections.

By experimentation I found that the best method to create the animation was by using blendshapes.

 What I did first was model and set-up a character for my brother to animate I made it with simple controls so that he could animate it himself. He then completed the animation and gave me the animation file back so that I could use it in the script.

 The next problem was that I could only use one blendshape with the script. This proved to be quite constraining because the animation appeared quite jerky and not very nice too look at. I suppose one would not notice it that much when there were loads of the troop all moving, but I decided that it was important that the animation upfront was made of sterner stuff.

 I tried to figure out different methods in order to get the animation to look more convincing. First I tried using two different blendshapes so that the blend would be less noticeable. The real problem was getting the shapes to work together in an expression. Using a sin wave and a cos wave meant that they did peak at different times but the in-between was not resting on the start shape. So it was a mix between the two shapes that made a very ugly and deformed in-between.

 The final product would have to be a mix to seem more convincing. So the very front characters would just be the actual keyframed animation instance using the script. Because of the way the script was set-up it made it very flexible, so I could give it almost any shape and it would duplicate it and give me complete control over the group. Then the back characters would just be blendshapes but they would be so numerous that the fact that they are moving would be enough.

 However there is nothing in this method that would really restrict me from just instancing all the geometry to animate properly.

 In the end I decided to hand in a version that was purely dependent on the blendshape and therefore would create less actual work for the user. This was mainly because I didn’t want to have a behavioral system that looked good only when you animated the character for how ever long you wanted the shot.

 As that would be more time consuming and as this script is all about time saving I though it best to use the blendshape method! I also set about making the animation more blendshape friendly so that the Mud Men did look like they were moving. By just using simple rotation movements the deformation on the in-between frame would be less obvious and hopefully look more convincing.