Yesterday I completed a new animation! This is my second time making a proper animation in Blender and it has been a real learning experience. I’ve done a bunch of modeling and rendering stills already and animating things is both a whole new artistic skill but also a whole bunch of technical tools you need to learn.
Here is the dope sheet for all animated armature channels on me and on the bike. I think it looks terrifying now, but it is just how things end up as you filter down and start adding small details here and there.
The dope sheet is a great tool! My first animation I made almost completely in the graph editor, which gets kind of overwhelming at some points. You really need to use both tools. Make a rough blockout of the animation by setting poses at key moments, then start interpolating between them by creating poses in between. Dip into the graph editor every now and then to tweak certain details. This video was pretty useful to show me the rough idea, even though I did not end up using the automatic overshoot technique very much in the end.
It worked out great, and I never felt like I ran out of momentum. I did need to delete and start over the liftoff animation twice. The key making that part work was to really make sure the bike lags behind to convey that there is interplay between the inertia of my body and the inertia of the bike as my wings push me higher each stroke.
The backdrop was a headache. My initial vision was that there would be open fields next to the roads like I’m out biking in the countryside. Then reality hit and I realized that the cost of rendering a landscape for every frame would completely wreck my rendering time budget.
I rendered two forested hills in a separate scene and placed them as big billboards in the background. It’s a cheap solution and the illusion is broken if you look just somewhat closely but it was good enough for me. In the animation, I am actually stationary and everything else moves right to left. The big cluster of rocks provide a moment where I can reset the animation for the billboards.
My perspective. The white boxes and floating tree to the right are just to provide shadows which helps to convey the feeling of velocity and forward movement. The trees and rocks are from the florapaint asset pack which I got as part of a big bundle of paid plugins and asset packs some time ago.
The bike rig. I made a driver to animate the chain (which is impossible to see unless you are way close, so it’s kind of pointless) as well as a driver for changing the pitch of the pedals as the crank rotates. The pedals have tweak controls too, allowing me to animate the pitch of my feet which I make use of during the liftoff and landing parts of the animation.
Thank you for reading, and I wish you all the best!
Finkel Uxnarås