John Thomas Body Mechanics Jumping Montage

This project was designed to focus on body mechanics, from weight to inertia and how a person might hold themselves when these forces are moving them. I used a matching technique to block out and refine the movement, I reordered a reference from a specific angle and matched a camera to that reference in Maya to animate from using other angles to make sure the body still looked natural. There are multiple jumps to show multiple different points of balance and different poses and an understanding of a wider variety of motions.
The rig used was the Ultimate Bony Maya rig by Ugur Ulvi Yetiskin found :
https://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/character-rigs/c/ultimate-bony-for-maya

More:

This was the first project I started leaning into match cam techniques. I made the reference myself making sure to have the camera at a near orthographic angle so that when importing the reference I didn’t have to set up a camera and attempt to match it. Side note I recently acquired a plugin for a Blender that can make matching a camera much easier by simply controlling the different horizon lines or vanishing lines, you still need to set the focal length and depth correctly though. For some reason, despite being on a tripod my camera moved around a lot between shots but it could be corrected with simple translations. You can kind of see that here where I overlayed the animations with the reference:

The most interesting part of this study was the upper body. I think it’s easy for us to figure out how legs should behave we study them a lot and when moving they can only physically work in a few ways. However, the upper body is technically free to do whatever it wants. The torso obviously still hast to follow the legs to a certain extent, but the arms and neck can do a lot and not through off any balance or weight or it can do very little and not throw off the sense of momentum. For instance, in the side jump, I contort in a weird way in midair to achieve a specific action. First off I’m winding up to throw something into the street(in my head it was a grenade, but it was just a pinecone), but I’m also jumping meaning my feet are in the way of where I want to throw my pinecone too, so I ended up pulling my legs in after launching while leaning my torso to one side. Then I push my legs under my torso where it almost looks like I am leading with my torso the only thing keeping my balance when I land being momentum for the most part. I remember this, along with the fact I did more than one jump, causing confusion for some people. I think if I had done this without reference I would have guessed that the torso would always lag behind the legs meaning when I landed I would have either been straight or leaning back until I could pull myself forward on solid ground or the torso caught up with my now slower feet. All in all, it was fun and interesting to study the weight and body mechanics of weird jumps and it shows that motion isn’t always intuitive.