My Current Progress on the Big Fish Animation: 5-9-24

Time for another Project in Progress, where every seven(ish) days, make an update to what I’m working on. While I planned to get it done this week, my most recent project, The Big Fish Exhibit, is going to need a bit more work. But, I still made a lot of progress, so lets get started!

Need some context? Catch the beginning of this project with the link here!

The Big Fish Exhibit: A Project in Process

Planthead’s Animation Process:

The first thing I did was animate Planthead. This was smoother sailing than Blockhead as this time I knew the method I wanted to use for his animation and didn’t have to experiment. Planthead is calmer and more reserved than Blockhead, with subtler movements in his walk cycles and less obvious poses. This also saved a lot of time, as less poses mean less movements to time in relation to everything else.

I did struggle during the first walk cycle where he was holding on to Blockhead’s hand. If I had him walking upright, his arm would stretch out unrealistically. But I didn’t want them too close or their heads might intersect while walking. I found a balance in the walk cycle by having him lean forward as much as was realistic. I still had trouble making sure his back leg didn’t stretch too much, but he moves fast enough to where it’s not obvious. Ultimately, I was happy with the work I did and decided to move on.

The only thing I might adjust is his second walk cycle. The root movement is too fast in relation to the distance each step spans, making him slide forward weirdly. The fix for this would be to either to lengthen the step distance, quicken the animation all together, or slow down the root motion. Not ideal, since I liked both independently, but its something that I’ll need to come back to before its time to render.

Onto the fish!

The Fish Animation Process

When it came to animating the fish, it was relatively smooth sailing. Starting off, I didn’t like the blocked in root movement I already set up. The root motion mostly went in straight lines, which didn’t feel realistic for a creature swimming in the water. Instead, I switched it for some node paths and an object constraint called “Follow Path”.

As the name implies, it restricts the fish’s location to a path in the Blender scene. By default it’s set to the end of the path, so I offset it by -100 to start them at the beginning. Then I added keyframes to the offset modifier to make the fish move along the path. There is the “animate path” option to do this automatically, but I wanted to do it manually to have more control of the timing.

To move the tail, I used three keyframes to curl it left and right and five to curl the fins in the opposite direction. This makes it look like the fins are being dampened by the mass of the water around them. The extra two frames to the fins are to create a “flick” effect by curling them the opposite direction faster than the tail moved. I thought it looked more realistic that way.

After the tail was done, I would add a few keyframes to the fins to move them up and down. This wasn’t a set motion like the tail, just added where I thought it was necessary. Then I made some adjustments to the head and “shoulders” of certain fish to turn them along their route. I only did this for fish who had to take sharp turns and were close enough to the camera.

Then that was it! It may not be fully realistic to how fish would actually move, but they look realistic enough in my eyes to forgive myself for not looking at a reference before I dove in. My only qualm is that they may still be moving too quickly, a problem that happened the first time I blocked out their animation as well. That time, I lengthened the animation from 150 frames to 450, and I don’t really want to make it any longer. If it bothers me enough I’ll see what it looks like if I slow the rendered video in Adobe Premiere. For now, however, I’m ready to move on.

But for now that is it for this week’s Project in Progress. Thank you for reading if you made it to the end. I’m still hoping to have this project done by the end of May, but we will see.

Until next time!