Day 3-Graph editor and more keyframes

What I did today:
Today I worked in the graph editor in Blender. While I was doing some of that I realized that the arm wasn't twisting the right way and showing the opposite side of the hand when it was in the 90-degree position. To fix this I went back and made it so instead of just the forearm part of the arm moving it was the entire arm together when moving into the 90-degree angle. Doing this also made the arm move in a much smoother manner as well.

After fixing this mistake I finally moved onto using the graph editor.

In Blender, the graph editor is used for a lot of things such as fixing bugs or kinks in the motion of an animation but also for things such as the speed of an object or the delay it has when it moves. I am using it to help with the speed of the motions and the delays when the arm is switching from positions.

This is what the graph editor looks like. When selecting each point to edit the graph it gives you a lever-type display and by clicking and holding on one side moves that side of the graph up or down which affects the movement in the animation. Each point represents the x,y, or z-axis of whatever part of the arm is selected. There are six because three are for the location and three are for rotation. And each set of six is in the place where the keyframe is in that location. In this screenshot, it shows the keyframes on frames 20, 30 and 50. 

The first thing I did was experiment with the graph editor but after getting used to it I decided to first adjust the x-axis for the location of the forearm so that it moves faster towards the 30 frame mark, which helps speed up the animation and makes it look more human.

After that, I wanted to add the animation of the arm going up with the palm facing up so I added them to frame 70 and 80 but then I moved them over to frame 60 and 70 to make it go down faster. The keyframe on frame 60 is a halfway point of the forearm going down and the keyframe on frame 70 is of the arm fully extended down with the palm up. I also made adjustments to the keyframes in these frames on the graph editor by moving the y-axis location node to make the arm go down a bit faster. I also changed the total frame count back to 150 to give me more room for the keyframes to work on the movements of the arm.

This is what the animation looks like so far.

What I'm doing on Monday:

On Monday I'm going to work on adding some more keyframes for the next half of the animation which will be the arm coming back up from palm up to the 90-degree position again to back to palm down. To give myself shortcuts and cut my work time down, I'll be working on just duplicating some of the positions I already have and just putting those in instead of hand animating it again and finding the positions for the arm again. I'll walk more about how I duplicate things on Monday as well.

Day 2- Finding checkpoints

What I did today:
Today I worked on finding the checkpoints for the arms, meaning the crucial points where the arm has a stopping point or an in-between point between the movements.

Keyframes in Blender are made by pressing "I" on the keyboard which gives this popup where you can choose what you want to keyframe, for example, you can choose to keyframe the rotation of the arm separate from the location keyframe. In this animation, because the entire arm is moving at . once I'm keyframing the entire character in the area I want it.

I decided my first checkpoint to be in the side movement when the arm is coming up.

I put the keyframes for this movement at frame 20 so that it would be fairly quick. 

For my second checkpoint, I made it when the arm was at a 90-degree angle and made it at frame 60 so that I would have space for any more keyframes later on. 

For my third checkpoint, I made it in-between the first and second one on frame 40 which I later moved to frame 30 with the arm still sideways but past the 90-degree point so that it would look like more of a natural circular motion that is made when an arm moves like the video I used as a reference.

After playing the video it felt a bit too slow so I ended up changing the whole frame amount from 150 frames to 100 and moving the end keyframe to 100 as well. This gave it a faster movement speed like how it would be in real life.

This is what the animation looks like so far, it is rough but I like the general motion as to me it feels like how the main points of the movement in the reference.

What I'm doing tomorrow:

Tomorrow I'll be working on making the motion look and move more naturally by adding more keyframes, and also going into the graph editor which I haven't used too much in general and I'll go more into it tomorrow of what the graph editor is. I'm hoping to learn how to use it better so that I can make my future projects better and so I can broaden my knowledge in animation tools.

Day 1- Arm animation

What I did today:
Today I started my first project which is just an arm moving in a twisting motion with the fingers closing into a fist. I started with this to start small with the animations I do to first get really good at . small animations and then progress to larger ones.

I started by finding a model online of an arm that already had a rig built into it. A rig is pretty much the bones of any model and these rigs have points that help move the model.

I found the model I used on free3d.com which already had a pretty good rig built into it.

This is what the arm looked like in the Blender viewport, the gray triangles are the rig and each triangle acts as a "bone" that when moved moves that section of the arm. The tab at the bottom with the numbers is a timeline to add keyframes for animating, which I'll be using a lot. I'll also be using another form of the timeline which is a dopesheet which is just a more simple version of the timeline.

I used this video of my own arm as the movement I wanted as the bases of this animation.

To start moving the arm and its rig I first moved into pose mode which is specifically for moving around the bones in a rig. Object mode is more for just adding in different objects and viewing what your making.  Edit mode which I won't be using for this project is for editing objects for example: to extend a cube to make it longer or to make new shapes with existing ones. Edit mode is used more for modeling which isn' something I'm doing for this month so I probably won't be using it much, if at all.

The final thing I did for today was to set a starting position for the arm and then create keyframes at the start and end of the animation with the arm in the same position at both end and start. I did this because I'm going to make the animation loop. By having keyframes of the same position at the start and end this lets the animation seamlessly loop without jumps. Also to make sure all parts of the rig keyframe at the end and the start I have to select all of the parts and keyframe them together so that there isn't a rogue piece. I made the project 150 frames for now just as a good starting, and if needed later on I can extend or cut how many frames I want. 

What I'll do tomorrow:

Tomorrow I'll be finding the points that I want to use as the "checkpoints" in the animation. These checkpoints give the animation the basic movements for the full animation. For example, the first checkpoint will probably be the arm lifting up. The checkpoints will be starting points and after them, I'll be focused on the smaller movements like the smaller wrist movements and finger movements.

Month Plan

For the rest of January and February, I'll be working on animations of living beings. For example, I'll be doing animations for different body parts such as arms and trying to make smooth movements for them. From there I'll make animations of people and animals walking or running or doing other types of movements. To make these animations I'll be using tutorials on youtube to help me make them, but I will be using different models that I will download from the internet.

This tutorial will probably be one of the videos I follow to make a good walk animation.

I'll also be using videos like these for references for the movement of animals as it is harder to find tutorials for animal movements.

I'll be using different tutorials and references for the animations I make.

 My First Project:

For my first project, I'll be making an animation of arms and fingers moving in a fluid motion with the first movement just being a simple twist of the arm and a closing fist. The purpose of this first animation is for me to start with a smaller animation that I make as good as possible before I move onto something bigger such as a walk or run cycle