Reincarnation
Try to reincarnate the character role in the story. This will help you more to react and observe the acting roles better. Also it will make you part of the story.
Balloon water (anticipation)
When we pushed our finger into the balloon water, we will notice that its shape has changed and other parts were moved spontaneously to keep the balance. This is similar to the human body, because Most of the human body is contains from water (more then 75%).
When the character will move his right leg, other parts like shoulders, waist, left hand… will move spontaneously. Animators call that anticipation.
Emotions
The lowest emotional levels, when the body parts are close together such as: thinking, reading, writing, crying. On the contrary, the highest emotional levels, when the body parts are directing away from the center of geometry such as: screaming, fighting, running…
Weight and Balance
This is what makes us believe in the character as a life. Without weight and balance we cannot reflect a real emotions or logic in the characterization.
Tips:
- How to define the balance line?
Weight is depends on the gravity strength for the body mass. Every body mass has a center of the geometry (center of the weight). If we draw visual line intersect columnar center of the geometry with ground line, the balance line will be defined. It will divide the body for two pieces.
- You should consider balancing from views, front and side.
Motion Curves
If you want your character poses full of life and movements, you should take care of the motion curves. Take a look at the below demonstration images and you shall be able to define your own curves.
Tip: Cartoon animations (the most dynamic animations) use this technique most widely with more exaggeration.
Silhouette
The main purpose of using the silhouette is to separate the layers by increasing contrast between these layers. Another purpose is to facilitate describing objects and characters by posing and viewing the best angel that could give better understanding for its nature.
After finishing the posing woks for Matrouk at different key frames in XSI, I exported these poses as a several obj files.
* Because Matrouk is one of my characters that I am working on for my upcoming short movie which is in the animation stage, also my lighting rigs and HDR setup was not created yet. I will go back to render with to ZBrush and composite in Photoshop.
Back to ZBrush
I imported one of the obj poses into ZBrush, applied the alpha map as displacement map and start to modify the joints areas and few muscles depending on the postures.
Tips: Appling the alpha map as a displacement map
1- Import the obj pose (it should be the number of polygons an UVs)
2- Divide the model to the same subdivision level in the sculpting process.
3- Import the Alpha map(from the Alpha tab)
4- Flip the Alpha map vertically
5- Enter the Alpha depth factor number in the intensity
6- Apply the displacement alpha button
