Catwoman Full Body Whipping Insight

  Hello! Wanted to share and highlight what is one of the bigger pieces of full body animation I've done yet. 

  Purrty. 🐱

  When animating that little jump and rotation, I realized I'd have to come up with a solution to keep Catwoman in place, as the pivots of her feet are at the heel, as opposed to the toes, which is where her weight is positioned.

  Now, a “correct” way to do this would be to create empties at her toes, parent the foot bones to these empties, and then animate the EMPTIES instead of the feet, thus creating a temporary pivot at the toes. The problem was, I had already animated this motion, and wasn't looking to redo a good chunk of it just to follow the "correct" workflow. Instead, I placed a primitive at her feet for reference, and then animated the root bone to match the movement.

  Know the rules, and then break them! Another example of this would be how I handled the whip intersecting with the floor.

  As you can see, the whip is JUST a bit too long.

  Since we're hand-animating the whip (and doing so counter to Catwoman's animation), I really didn't want to spend the hours required to carefully drag the tip along the floor, and I don't think anyone would really notice. Time ill-spent. So, I simply added a shapekey to the whip, added keyframes to the shapekey, and shortened it a bit whenever the tip came into contact with the floor.

  For the whip strike, I wanted to sell it. Powergirl will be under the influence of Kryptonite, but she's still a super-powered being, so Catwoman is really giving it her all. The first thing I did was push the limits of the root motion, raising up Catwoman's whole body as much as possible and bringing it down quickly. Offestting the forarm FK bone as much as possible also helped sell the impact.

  In my opinion though, the multiple shapekeys I added helped the most. Watching my reference footage, I noticed the upper arm shakes at the impact. So, we added those shapekeys. Further than that, there are shapekeys on her ears and goggles, set to bring them down and “jiggle” a bit. Despite being a rather subtle effect, it completely changed the feel of the whole animation, lending it some weight.

  Always consider shapekeys as an essential part of the process!

  Project will be out this month. I'm going through a drastic shift in my post-production workflow as I completely remove Adobe products from the pipeline. I've reached my limit with Premiere; the program has been consistently corrupting my footage, as seen below.

  Completely unworkable and, to this point, completely unsolvable. I've changed drivers, tried different versions of Premiere, turned off/on various functions like hardware acceleration, and more. The issue will go away for awhile, but then it will crop right back up at the most inopportune of moments. I'm sure there's a good reason for the issue hiding somewhere down in all that electricity and silicone, but the fact is, Premiere is the ONLY video editing/playback software I've ever known to have such problems, while simultaneously being the most expensive. This does not spark joy! 

  I'm currently using Blender as my video editor (don't laugh). It's surprisingly functional; along with the Blender compositor, this might actually be the start of a beautiful friendship, but we'll see. I don't like changing pipelines like this during a big project, but at this point I dread opening up Premiere, so I'm simply not considering it an option.

  Solutions abound! I'll be back with that final public preview, and then release.

  Talk soon!