Animation: People at a Meeting

I created a draft animation in Blender and uploaded it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4HrtuV-GXY . It is of a group of people sitting at a table having a meeting. This is very much a work in progress, so I’d like suggestions about how to improve it. My primary concerns are things like how realistic the motion looks and how good the acting is (both body language and facial expressions) but I’m open to any and all feedback. I did notice that several times the hands intersect with the table, so I need to fix that. Also, there are no drivers for shape keys that fix armature deformations, which is the reason there is a pinching effect when characters bend their arms. I realize that the lighting isn’t very good, but part of the reason for that is to make the render times faster since this is only a draft animation.

Simple easy lighting is fine for when working out the animation. Same for simple easy materials. It takes many tweak-render-observe-frown cycles to get animation to look good, even with mocap data or video reference.

Those people move way too stiffly, like a mechanical part in one position, suddenly moving linearly to another position, stopping suddenly. Real people twist quickly, maybe overshoot or undershoot, and make small adjustments. Generally, for anything that moves, speed of motion goes from zero, smoothly up to some travel speed, then slows to zero. For living things, it’s a bit sloppier.

Even doing nothing, there are constant small adjustments of balance, breathing, small starts as if getting ready to move. Small unconscious nods of agreement, and micro-expressions as a person listens.

Probably the biggest thing to fix after that is when a person turns their head and body, they don’t do those simultaneously. The head turns first, and the body turns only enough, with different timing, to support the head turn without having to twist the neck too much. This affects balance, and so various small lateral movements occur. Maybe the shoulder in the direction the person faces rises a teeny bit - so I observe in myself, experimenting while sitting here. But then I’m sitting crooked. You do have some of these sorts of details, in some places, but not yet tweaked to believabilty.

The crinkling in the elbows is a solvable problem, but I am not good enough at life form animation yet to know how to fix it. Experiment more with weight painting, at least. Making correct mesh topology is crucial, they say.

For being crude and unbelievable, still that is a good accomplishment. Many would-be animators never get that far. Please continue working on it, and keep observing people in real life.

Thanks for the feedback. However, one thing I don’t understand is why the characters move linearly even though Blender creates curved F-curves. The turning of the body and neck is the result of NLA strips blending in and out, and that appears to cause things to move linearly not curved, so I need to change that, but the keyframes on actions appear to be part of curved F-curves.

In my recent animation tests I’ve been working around this by having the drivers based on a property of the actual armature joint that’s being used. For example if the arm is being tucked the driver is having the rotation of the forearm bone go past a certain point.