The basic physics in 3D animation

Recently I had to submit an assessment that shows how competent I am in representing physics in 3D from the real world. I thought I did well, so did my classmates. It was challenging at first trying to think of what I should do for my animation, we had a choice of two complexity levels, A & B, within those complexity levels were three other choices of different scenes we could animate. I chose to create the higher complexity level, B, to give myself a challenge and have chosen to have my character "jump on and off an object then settle"... easier said than done.

What my teacher has taught me is that without planning and research there is no animation. Time to get some references from my reliable pal, YouTube, and search what we're all probably thinking... funny cats. Wait, not what you were thinking? I guess parkour will do as well also.

Luckily I used to know of a parkour athlete back then who has a YouTube channel, LaFlairParkour. This guy has got awesome tutorials and parkour videos of him jumping and running around in streets and parkour venues. I found just what I was looking for, a video that he uploaded very recently of him jumping from rail to rail in the city.
 

I like this video because you can see the follow through of the hips, the way he uses his arms to give him that extra momentum especially at the last jump and the impact he creates that affects his whole body and the railings as he lands. I used this for reference but this video didn’t have him settling so I took a look at his other videos and found one where Jesse sticks the landing.
 

This landing continues as if he just jumped a railing and I thought it works pretty well. I sketched some thumbnails to get an idea of exactly what I was doing for each pose, and timing each jump by the amount of frames it takes to get from one railing to another.

Now that I have planned and researched what I am doing, it is now time to put that research to good use. For every animation we must start with the blocking stage. I am using AnimationMentor's rig Stewart because he seems to fit in my action scene with that lanky body... and because he's the only one who showed up for auditions. The blocking stage was simple and seemed okay for the starting structure, I didn't put a lot of breakdowns between the poses for the first stage of blocking.

After receiving some feedback from my teacher and classmates, I made some adjustments and added something at the start and the end, the anticipation and the conclusion, also because the scene was too short. The scene must be at least 150 frames to 250 frames running at 25 fps, therefore I had to find a way to increase it's run time.

Without asking for feedback, which I should have done, I moved onto splining the animation and making some more adjustments.

After receiving even more feedback and making more adjustments I happily animated my way to the final animation. This took a while, but thanks to my animation mentor for having taught me about the basics and flow of animation like reverse C shapes and follow throughs, which they explained very well, I have created my best artwork that I never had thought I would achieve in animation. I think it's close to what it represents.

Finally, the final animation of the final assessment, due the final week of this semester.