Moho Forum

Hi all,

Looking at the selgin's animated avatar, I can't believe this work is "just" done with bones !
I'm right or not ?

Where have you read that it is only bone?
The anime file is provided by Selgin here

-G

I have not read anything about...
Did I say that ?

But the link provided will close the topic anyway.
Thanks.

Hey, nobody close the topic before I say thank you for the mention!
One think I always love more than before is the posibility of animate points. I think most of the magic comes from there, bones works great for the hard work, but the little details come from points (and textures, now I'm fan of them).
You should take a look to jwlane's work on share your work section. He is a master on point animation and his work is very inspirational.

Your right Selgin, you're the only one allowed to close this topic

I wasn't sure if you were working with points or traditionnal oignon skin. As AS is known for its bones abilities, I couldn't believe you could get such result only with bones...

Anyway, I'm going to follow your suggestion about jwlane's work. There will be probably a lot to learn.

BTW, the link provided in the topic forwarded by Genete is broken.
This one:
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?z2d4qjdtimz

Regards.

AS is a great software and works even better when you start to erase the classic limits. You have bones, ok, but that doesn't mean all your movements must be rotations and traslations on X and Y. You have the "hipothetical Z axis", and work with it only depends of your ingenious.
That's why I love Jwlane's work, he is a master on false Z movements.

About the file, sorry, I haven't it at home, but on monday I will upload it again and provide you all a new link.

As an aside, I was listening to George Harrison's Roll Over Beethoven when I realized Selgrin's avatar was perfectly synced to the track, his little bird stomping along in time to the track... damn it looked good and made me laugh. The girlfriend loved it just as much and remains puzzled as "How he do that".

You might want to try syncing it to some funky music track and releasing it as a mobile download. I'd buy t.

Great, I'll wait 'til monday

BTW: what software do you guys use for making animated gifs? I use Jasc Animation Shop but it has it's limitations, especially for manipulating colours to squeeze everything within the 256 gif colours palette.

Atout66 wrote:Great, I'll wait 'til monday

Sorry!
I forgot to post it the monday I said. And the next monday too...

But now I have remembered it, so here is the link to download the avatar
http://sharebee.com/7bc2b88f



PD: to make he animated gifs I render a little quicktime movie, then I import it to Corel Photopaint and export it as gif.

I am eager to download your avatar file, but the link you posted requires me to "take a survey" to unlock the download. I am not interested in giving any information to anyone just to download a file. I hope we will be able to access your avatar file some time in the future without such a hurdle.

Thanks for all you do for the forum!

Ouch, sorry, I uploaded it to sharebee because mediafire was down.
now, I have several links you can try

http://rapidshare.com/files/327515110/t ... .anme.html
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=KLFVSUWW
http://www.zshare.net/download/70529610e1914747/

You are welcome
People on this forum have teach me a lot of things, and it's because of this forum I can work as animator now.
I just try to give that help back.

Thanks so much for making your avatar file available! I have already downloaded it and opened it up.

Is all the magic just in the point movement?

I do not understand what the cameras are doing, nor do I understand yet how the changes of layer order make it work.

But I plan to study it carefully until it all makes sense.

Thanks again. It is a great piece of animation... so simple and elegant.

gleeful wrote:Thanks so much for making your avatar file available!
Is all the magic just in the point movement?
I do not understand what the cameras are doing, nor do I understand yet how the changes of layer order make it work.

Thank you too Selgin. For me it's also a great study object. Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm a newbee) but what I understand from it, that the layers have to be animated just to let some body parts (e.g. the eyes) disappear behind others (the head) and let them appear again.
The camera is not animated though (there's only a keyframe on frame 1). The bones are doing their wonderful thing together with the point animation. By playing the animation and removing key frames in different layers and redoing this you can see what's going on in the point movement. Try this e.g. on the pico layer and you'll see the beak is moved mainly by point movement. Also the movement of the eyes is a lot of point animation.

But I've to study this much further

You are welcome

Now I gonna try to explain the file
It has this layers:
_nada = nothing
_cisne = swan
___ojo iz = left eye
___pico = beak
___ojo der = right eye
___cuello = neck
___cuerpo = body

Now, the layer "nothing" was created just to be rapidly selected and see a preview animation without any construction curve (in AS 5 there wasn't that fantastic little button to hide construction curves).

Galbatron is right, the camera keyframes have nothing to do, I just created that keyframe on frame 1 to adjust the size, and then forgot to cut and paste it on frame 0.

First, the bone layer has a cycle of movements, if you -as Galbatron said- erase the animation of each vector layer, you'll find that the basic movement is made with bones (try eliminating the layer order keys too, then you will find the most basic animation).

For the neck movement. I go to frame 11 (which is where the neck is most on profile) and move the neck layer behind the body layer. In frame 32 I put neck layer back over the body layer. This automatically gives you a sensation of 3d rotation, because neck is travelling from front to back.

Eyes are moved on layer order too to give the sensation of head rotation. The difference is that eyes have point movement too to adjust that 3d look, so when the head is almost in complete profile the eyes will be flatter than in 3/4 position. All this movements are cyclical.

The beak uses the same formula. The layer order is moved in time and has point animation to adjust. Look at frame 12, which is where the head is on complete profile, the beak edge is adapted to coincide with head edge. This makes more fluid the pass of the beak layer from front of the head to back of the head and vice versa.

On body layer there are keys for the body and each foot. It's not too fancy, actually I don't remember what I was thinking when animate the body points , but for each foot I remember exactly. I created two shapes for each foot, I made this thinking on give the sensation you can see the sole foot when it is up. Foot is bigger when it's up and smaller when it's down, I made this to give the sensation foot is a little closer to the viewer when it's up.

I think that's all. Remember that on AS 6 to animate layer order you must activate the animate layer order option on bone or group proprieties, depth sort tab.

I hope everything be more clear now, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask.