Final Project~Mani jumping of the board

This is the final project I did and I will be submitting this instead of the mani's personality. Looking at the videos above, it might seem easy but the little details and movement of the body really took me loads of time to polish but I personally feel that my effort payed off as I learnt a lot along the way as well. The 2 videos above are the same animation but playblasted at 2 different angles for you to see. I used IK for my feet so it will not be messed up when I adjust the body while the arms is FK to give it a more natural feel to the whole animation. Now moving on, I learned that the squash and stretch principle is so important in making this animation works. I was at a lost at first after I polished the first part of the animation where mani climbs up the board as I added more weight to mani to show that mani used a substantial amount of energy to climb up the board. 

The hard part comes after this where I need to make the squash and stretch effect works smoothly as if mani really is jumping off the board. I painstakingly key frame each time I had to polish the squash and stretch effect especially when mani is in mid air as I need to take body physics into consideration. After all this done, I was so happy but what came after that was really bad. I playblast and realize that the video is too fast so I was at the verge of crying as I have almost 50 keyframes which will definitely kill me to extend every single one. However, thanks to mr douglas he taught me how to use the graph editor to increase certain length between certain key frames to make it look smoother. It was really helpful as I was able to increase gaps between each key frame to make certain part stretch longer. After that I continued to edit it using graph editor and played around with the tangents to help me make the whole animation even more natural. 

Finally, I would like to add that I really learnt a lot throughout my journey of 3pdf and I am elated that I was able to accomplish such an animation at the end of the day especially with the help of my lecturer Mr Douglas.