Joyous Dance Animation, Behind the Scenes
This short animation is part of a larger project celebrating dance and movement, particularly joyous actions like these exuberant jumps. The basic blocking (below) was developed in Illustrator with an eye toward creating a flexible, re-usable rig that could be adjusted for a variety of characters and body types.
Sculpt and Rig
The stylized body type lends itself to a simplified geometry, which I built in Cinema 4D incorporating the Volume Mesher. After retopologizing, I used the C4D Toon rig for its versatility and ability to stretch, which is ideal for animating dancers and gymnasts. I built the shoes from scratch and weight-painted everything except the head, which I built separately (I used a parent constraint later).
Key Pose Blocking
For reference, I modeled key poses from a gymnast (the fantastic Heath Thorpe). I blocked out the vertical and rotational movements with a simple block (fittingly!) and nulls to get the basic animation curves I wanted. Then I animated the down positions on the legs and proceeded up from there.
Marvelous Designer
For the male, I wanted to create an open shirt in Marvelous Designer so that it would catch air with his jump. In Cinema, I add a T-pose to the start of the animation, baked all the frames as an alembic, and imported the file into Marvelous. To get a sense of flight, I reduced the gravity settings in MD for the few frames when the characters were in the air. The result was then exported back to C4D as an alembic, and I built node materials to texture the fabrics for rendering in Redshift.