I dream of Kung Fu

Hi everyone. I know I haven’t posted anything here in a while. I’ve been busy finishing my work experience at colt telecom. Learnt loads of stuff about Internet Servers, Linux etc.

Anyway, now I’m back with new ideas and inspirations. I guess the purpose of this thread is to explore the possibility of making a Kung Fu fight scene in blender. Is this possible. I’ve designed some cool characters, now I’m busy rigging which is difficult because Kung Fu requires the body to be so flexible.

The shoulders have proven too difficult to rig so I’m busy replacing it with a relatively loose shirt with a low polygan count. This makes rigging that little bit easier. The legs are easy. The arms are a little tricky trying to get the bicep buscles to expand as the elbow bends so perhaps I’ll make that shirt with long sleeves down to the hands lol.

I’ve also modelled a nice Dojo for where the fight scene could take place although it still needs some touch ups.

I guess the next big challenge is animation. Is it possible to animate a fight scene using keyframes? I notice a lot of these Kung Fu movies have quite a repetitive rythm of punch/kick and block/evade. I’ve also been experimenting with bullet time effects just to give it that Matrix feel.

Can this digree of realistic animation be manually adapted through keyframes into blender or can this only be done by rigging my anatomy to a variety of deflective nodes and start kicking ass in front of a computer-monitored motion sensor.

All feedback is welcome ; )

PS: did I mention the price tag on this motion sensor technology

You might be interested in looking at some of the other threads which are going on right now about the programmatic creation of fight-scenes a la the Massive system used in Lord of the Rings. Although these systems are primarily interested in creating huge meelees involving hundreds of actors, some of the principles will still apply to your scenario, where only two or maybe a few more actors are involved.

The key concept is that your actors are going to need to be able to react to one another. When Kujo throws a kick, Kojo’s going to need to block it correctly. (But if Kojo’s not in a correct position where such a block could realistically be thrown, then Kujo’s kick is going to have to land and Kojo’s going to be flat on the mat.)

I don’t think that there’s anything in-particular about the movements themselves that is going to be a show stopper. You can animate anything. But the realism of the fight is really going to depend on the believability of what they do. (Not so much in how realistically the moves are depicted.)

everything can be animated - you could even sit down for an year and animate a particle swarm by hand… :wink:

in your case it comes down to really getting into that kung-fu thingy: watch any film you can get, watch it again and watch it in slow-motion/frame by frame. even better - try moves yourself. when you get the right feeling for the motion and timing, fire up blender and try to reproduce some movements. then try the interaction of two fighting characters, and then you should be ready for your final shot.

For an easy way to create some bicep muscle flex try modeling your arm bent to a ninty degree or so angle with the bicep bulging some. When you do the weighting weight some of the bottom of the bicep to the forearm. This makes the muscle stretch when the arm is unbent.

TorQ

Thanks everyone for you feedback. Well I have been studying the Matrix films very closely and the funny thing I found is that that are not as many collisions in a fight scene as you might think. Sound FX plays a major role here. I notice that some of the fight scenes in the Matrix are so fast that a large number of kicks; blocks and punches take place in a relatively small number of frames. Our assumptions coupled with the right sound FX such as hard hits andrushing air make us believe what haapened.

my conlusion: I probably won’t need to animate any direct interaction with the two fighting characters involved. For example if I only use four frames for a kick, the point of contact does not necessarily have to be in any one of those frames. People see the kick, then they here the hard hitting sound, then they see the opponent rolling across the floor. Should be believable enough.

Let’s face it, I don’t think any of the characters in the Matrix movies ever really got punched or kicked. I think the post production of my fight scenes will play a key role as opposed to the actual animation.

Thanks again for your feedback and nice idea about the bicep muscles TorQ :wink:

Good luck to you. I have tried rigging and never ended up being successful.

dante

Thanks Dante.

I’ve been very busy with rigging my character at the moment. Perhaps you could be more specific about the problems you’re having with rigging your characters. Is it a blender limitation? Maybe we’re having the same problems?

I’ve found that keeping the polygon count low makes it a lot easier to rig a character. I’m still having difficulties with some of the joints but I’m getting there.

I’m gonna try and get some server space so I can post a few pictures here. I’d like to hear what everyone thinks. Perhaps you have some examples too.

Feedback from all is welcome

thanks again

Jon