Showreel

This week, I made the final adjustments to my animation. I focused on refining the character’s motion arcs and added delays to the connected body parts to make the movement feel more natural and realistic.

Details

In addition to the nose arc mentioned earlier, I also made adjustments of the arc to the movement of the arms and head, allowing the overall motion arcs to feel more balanced.

I removed the awkward forward-and-backward swaying during the speaking parts and replaced it with a more appropriate breathing.

I further adjusted the lip sync to fix several distortion issues caused by improper controller settings. As a result, the mouth movements now look much more natural.

Reflection

Through this project, I gained a basic understanding of how to make useful references — such as how to set up a scene to make the performance feel more natural and supportive of the animation process.

After completing the early preparation, the first step should be adjusting the overall body movement, rather than rushing into lip sync. Lip syncing should be left for the later stages when working on the details.

When handling those details, it’s important to think about the reasoning and logic behind them. For example, adding delay to connected body parts makes movement feel more realistic — not because of artistic theory, but because that’s how motion works in reality. Understanding the logic behind an action leads to deeper learning, which is much more effective than simply copying the surface.

For future projects, I’ll be able to apply the experience I gained from these two projects more efficiently. Through this process, I also hope to deepen my understanding of animation and continue improving my skills.

This week, I moved on to the spline stage based on the revised blocking from last week. The process involved adding and removing a large number of frames to adjust the overall timing and rhythm of the animation.

Feedback

During the head-raising motion in the preparation phase, I encountered a common issue with the motion arc — the movement of the character’s nose didn’t follow a proper curve.

In natural motion, the nose should move along a smooth arc, which is determined by the joints function. This makes it important to pay close attention to arc design as early as the blocking stage, to ensure the motion looks natural.

In the calmer phase of the animation, I needed to add more pauses and held poses to maintain a clear rhythm. At the same time, I had to avoid adding unnatural forward-and-back body swaying, which I had previously used to fill space in the overall movement.

At this stage, I encountered a subtle issue — the character’s body stopped rotating too early, which made the movement feel unnatural. The correct approach is to maintain the body’s rotation throughout the entire phase until the action is complete.

This issue emerged throughout almost the entire stage. I made all the body parts move at the same time, without adding any delay between them. Ideally, the end parts, like the head and hands, should move first, followed by the base parts like the neck and arms. This kind of delay is very important for making the motion feel more natural.

In the facial expression part, especially around the mouth, there were still some strange deformations that made the lip movements look unnatural. This area needs further adjustment to improve the overall result.

Reflection

In the first stage of polishing the spline, many issues that were easy to overlook during the blocking stage became more noticeable. Two points stood out as especially important:

• Planning of motion arcs — movements should follow smooth and logical curves.
• Use of delay in specific parts of the body, which helps make the animation feel more natural and believable.

This week, I continued to refine the blocking, making more detailed adjustments, and also started working on the lip sync. This stage is more focused on careful polishing and fine-tuning.

Feedback

There were still some slight timing issues in the overall body movement this week. I need to constantly pay attention to maintaining coordination across the entire body.

In the preparation phase of the action, I needed to adjust the character’s eye direction to make the overall expression feel calmer. I also added blinks and similar small movements to help transition between different stages of the performance and make the character’s actions feel more natural.

When the character transitions from calm to angry, I need to exaggerate the facial expressions more to enhance the emotional impact. Without this, the expression may come across as stiff and less expressive.

In terms of facial expressions, many exaggerated features that appear when the mouth is closed tend to pull back or disappear once the mouth opens. This is especially noticeable with the corners of the mouth — when the mouth opens, the downward bend of the corners is often much less pronounced than when the mouth is closed.

For certain syllables, I needed to add more noticeable jaw movement to support the character’s speech, rather than relying solely on lip motion.

Reflection

I believe it’s important to develop the habit of constantly checking the overall body movement during the blocking stage. In many cases, unnatural animation comes from a lack of full-body motion.

For facial expressions, it’s also necessary to exaggerate when needed to enhance emotional clarity. Different emotions require different adjustments across various facial features, so it’s important to stay flexible and responsive when refining expression detail.

This week’s content covered the basic approach to blocking and an introduction to lip sync.

Speech production mainly relies on five parts of the body: the tongue, lips, jaw, teeth, and vocal cords. The focus should be on listening to the rhythm and connected flow of the audio, rather than matching it directly to written text.

Lip sync should be built around phonemes, the smallest units of sound that distinguish words.

To improve efficiency, mouth shape poses can be pre-saved using Studio Library.

Blocking

This week, I focused mainly on creating the character’s overall body movement. My primary goal was to establish the main direction and flow of the character’s actions.

Reflection & Feedback

One of the early problems I encountered — which is also a common one — was that I often moved only one part of the character, like the head, without involving the rest of the body. This made the animation feel very stiff, because in real life, any movement naturally includes subtle motion in other parts of the body. Adding these secondary movements helps make the overall animation feel more natural and believable.

Another commonly overlooked point is the character’s facial orientation. I realized that the face should be turned at least 45 degrees toward the camera, rather than showing a full side profile. When only one eye is visible, it tends to reduce the overall expressiveness of the performance.

In some of the more exaggerated movements, I tried to move the character’s chest by translating it directly. However, the correct approach is to achieve this motion through rotation, not translation. Simply translating the chest control makes the action look unnatural and awkward.

This week’s focus was on starting to perform certain actions ourselves to use as reference. It’s important to understand the essence of acting — to feel the emotional shifts like a real actor and reflect them through both body and facial expressions.

In doing so, we need to follow the three core principles of animated acting:
Clarity, Sincerity, and Simplicity.

Planning

Following the brief, I created a character and gave them a simple backstory, along with a specific situation they’re currently facing. This helped me better immerse myself in the role and stay emotionally connected during the performance.

I designed the character as a reluctant middle manager who has no choice but to take responsibility for his subordinates.

Performance and Recording

The reference I filmed went through multiple iterations and a gradual process of refinement. Through this experience, I also deepened my understanding of animated acting and how to convey emotion more effectively.

The first version was relatively rough and included some common acting mistakes — for example, the character moved too close to the camera, as if addressing the lens directly rather than speaking to another person. This broke the illusion of the scene and weakened the overall sense of context.

This version also lacked emotional variation, so I needed to show more emotional shifts in the later iterations.

In the second version, the overall context felt more appropriate, but the emotional transitions could have been signaled more clearly — for example, through a blink or other subtle cues. During the performance, I also needed to ensure that the character’s gaze stayed focused on the imagined person, even during larger physical movements.

The final version addressed all the previous issues and is now ready to be used as the final reference.

Spline Adjustment

This week’s work was based on last week’s feedback, focusing on further adjustments. I made the body rotation more realistic.

Feedback

The body movement during the sword-drawing phase is too flat in terms of motion arc. The action needs to be more exaggerated to give the following movements greater impact.

The slashing motion is too slow, which makes it feel weak and lacking in power. To fix this, the speed of the slash needs to be increased.

Further refinement

I adjusted all the movements and motion curves based on the previous suggestions.

Spline

This week, I mainly worked on converting the previous blocking into spline, while also addressing issues that couldn’t be solved during the blocking stage.

Feedback

The character’s posture in the opening phase needs to be adjusted to make the movement feel less stiff.

The turning motion of the body has a major issue. In my animation, the entire lower body rotates in place, which isn’t realistic. Instead, the character should pivot around one foot, like a compass, allowing the rest of the body to rotate naturally.

Rig

Based on my reference, I selected a suitable character rig. Since my animation doesn’t involve facial expressions, I chose a rig without facial controls, which also helps reduce distractions during the animation process.

Blocking

Based on my reference and the specific proportions of the rig, I made some adjustments to certain poses. For example, since the character’s head is slightly larger than average, I had to tweak the overhead sword pose to make it look more natural.

Feedback

In my character’s blocking, the preparatory pose felt too stiff. To improve this, I plan to adjust the action curves to make the movement feel more dynamic and fluid.

During the slashing motion, the action was designed too conservatively, which made the character appear too restrained. By exaggerating the motion arcs and pushing the curves further, I can improve the overall visual impact of the animation — without losing its sense of believability or weight.

This week focused on Blocking Plus, which involves adding more detail on top of the basic blocking. Small movements are introduced to prevent the character from looking stiff or lifeless.

Arcs are a fundamental part of natural movement — whether it’s an arm swing or a body turn, all actions should follow smooth and curved motion paths.

Moving hold is the slight bit of motion a character has while they are in a pose. If there is an absolute hold, a complete static pose that lasts several frames, a 3D character immediately feels lifeless.

Reference shot & Feedback

Using both the original reference video and my own sketches, I filmed a new reference with added dramatic effects. I also changed the camera angle — by switching to a first-person perspective, I aimed to make the animation more engaging and fun to watch.

However, since some movements are quite difficult to perform perfectly without training, my own reference included a few unnecessary motions. I had to adjust these and also extend the timing of certain actions to create a better overall rhythm in the animation.