Sitting and Standing!

This week I have another classic animation exercise to share; Animating a character sitting down and standing up. There’s nothing too exciting here as far as the motion goes. He plops down and then he jumps up. That being said, I tried to throw in a tiny bit of storytelling to give the motion some context. And there’s a bit more going on here behind the scenes! Here’s the result:

Animating a character sitting down and standing up is a great way to practice body mechanics. You really have to consider how a person’s weight is distributed, and in what ways the body moves to balance itself out. Similar to walking or running, sitting down is a controlled fall. To prevent this controlled fall from becoming a fall fall, we tend to lean our torso forward in order to counterbalance the shift backwards towards the chair. It’s all about maintaining a stable center of gravity. Observing video reference really helped me here.

When standing up from a sitting position, we often use our hands/arms to propel ourselves upwards. We typically use the arms of a chair, or our lap to do this. This added a little bit more complexity to the motion, as I had to once again make use of constraints. As a reminder, typically there are no simulated collisions in a program like Maya. And so if I want to have a hand come into contact with a leg, I need to use Maya’s constraint functionality. I covered this in a bit more detail in my Arms Crossed post, so please check that out for a better breakdown. There, I talk about the constraints I used in order for the character to cross their arms.

In this animation, there were several different points of contact that required me to use constraints. The most straightforward contact was the hand holding the spear. This was a super simple parent constraint. The slightly more interesting contacts were the hands resting on the legs, the forearms leaning on the legs, and the hands pushing off against the legs. What seems like three different points of contact, actually only required a single parent constraint per arm. By placing a locator within the hierarchy of the rig’s knee controller, I was able to animate the locator itself while it still followed the knee. And so when the hands initially come in contact with the legs, I constrained them to these knee locators. Then I just animated the locators themselves in order to simulate the different contacts the hands/forearms have with the legs. This made the process a bit faster, as I no longer needed to constrain and un-constrain the hands to different locations along the legs. Then they’re finally un-constrained from the knee locators during the launch upwards.

Even with a simple animation like this, there’s oftentimes a bit more complexity than you’d expect. While the animation itself isn’t super exciting, the process itself was an interesting challenge. And getting more practice with constraints was extremely helpful!

If you’d like to see earlier iterations of this animation, check out this Syncsketch link. Syncsketch users Roman, Hobby, and Toby Dart really helped me a lot with their feedback. So thank you to them!