Week 8 - Moving to 2nd Animation

     So, I'm not exactly liking my progress towards my TMNT animation, as the workload was greater than I expected. I over-keyed his stumbled movement at the beginning, and while attempting to cut the animation short, I've seemingly made him react to the ball impacting his face way too fast, and it is pretty frustrating to try and stretch out the keyed frames for the turn around. And so, I will put it off for the moment and work on my next animation, which will be an easier approach to adding to my senior portfolio.

    I wanted to proceed with a game animation next; I realize that actor, cutscene, and or animated picture-esque animation takes some time to really look and feel fluid, even with it possibly being only around 10 seconds or lower. The amount of emotion and exaggeration you have to put into the poses, and transitions between poses is crazy, and so I'd like to continue with a miniature game animation. 

    In a few of my classes, it was said that with game animation, when the player controls the character in-game, the motions and or animation should be snappy, and responsive the moment the player presses a button; so I want to capture that in this next animation.

    Not sure if I want to do the idle to kick and back to idle, or just the kick loop. However, I'm sure as I try to spline it, I'll get an idea of what I want to do to keep the workload low and to work on more rigs to increase my expertise. I've attempted to put less poses in to ensure that I get a "picture-book"-esque feel to my blocking, so that when I eventually put in in-betweens, everything doesn't feel over-keyed and disorganized, like most of my animation projects...

    Also I've been told by our animation teacher that constraints really help out, and recently more information about animation layers (I know, very sad), so I would like to believe progress will go a bit more smoothly.




Current Progress with Upwards Kick

Reference

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 2 - Part of my Stepped Process

Image
     For my first project, like I said, I wanted to start off with something simple to get the ball rolling. And so, a simple "important pose to important pose" work will do just that. I want to get this animation done as fast, and as efficient as possible, so if I can get this quick pose-to-pose practice done, and rendered a little fancy (since I grabbed an HDRI for some good lighting and a mini background), I think I'll feel pretty good to do a big second project.     So I've ultimately decided to use this very nice looking Raphael from TMNT rig ( Link ), and to create a back turn into wave animation. I have reference for the back turn, as well as the wave, however I could only get to the back turning with my stepped process so far. A strategy I've been trying to use to be more efficient is to count how many frames between each key pose in my reference, so that I'm not scrambling to find where I should put each key pose. Was I supposed to do that at the very...
Read more

Week 5 - A bit of splining

      It seems I'll need a bit more time on this animation. From the beginning, I had an idea of how I wanted the animation to go, but not exactly much written down, or the estimated timing I needed for such poses. And so, I've gotten things a bit more planned than before, and from the get-go, I realize there's a lot more frames to be keyed than I thought there'd be.     I've remade my animation outline with the many key poses and their "build up to key pose" frames (anticipation, breakdown, in-betweens, etc .), but here’s a basic rundown of what’s to come: Idle Impact Stumble (left and right) Stop and Realization (or anger) Turn to face camera Disappointed Wave     I've made the verdict of putting keyframes to turn Ralph back to what he was viewing... if I give myself enough time to do so. But I digress: For this week, I worked on the first part of Ralph's stumble and impact of the ball hitting his head. There might be too minimal root controller...
Read more

Week 11 - Finding Errors

      Progress is not the best for the millionth time. It seems like my way of animating can look good (with good camera work), however isn't as organized as it could be.      Last class had discussed the head of the character being a little too wobbly or faster than the body, so that was fixed, as well as the foot bouncing as if the kick was done on a bouncy surface, in which was fixed. However, as I'm trying to move to splining, I seemingly can't get to this phase, mainly because I've offset the root control and rotate root (?) control too much from the overall animation of the character, thus creating a mess of trying to fix the root, then the character itself, and vice versa. Also for the tail, the animation looks good stepped, however when moved to spline I realize that the stepped poses of the tail do not fit as correctly as the orthographic view shows. I attempted to make my own tail poses that stray away from the source material, but to no avail. An...
Read more