Moho Forum

just first part of this short sword fight I'm making

this is the first character and its movements

I tried not to get over detailed or exaggerated

sword fight WIP

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ENQax69_mM

Cool movements - this looks like it'll be great!

Nice

This already is really good. You know your movements and your timing.

Now to achieve perfection ...

- Every time the fighter gets into a hold, energy vanishes. This is impossible, as you know, in real physics. Thy this: sword reaches end position, next frame it gets just a bit farther (one swordwidth or so), next two frames it gets back to final position. You just can't get any extremity or sword into full stop from a swing, it always will swing a bit further until the momentum ist absorbed by the muscles.

- There's strobing in the fast swings, which is impossible to avoid with such broad movements of a slim object. Since we can't use smaller increments than a whole frame, we need to cram more positions into one frame. You could use multiple sword images, or a smear, or a combination of both, for just one or two frames. (Should be a separate layer.)

- The two pigtails or whatever you call that need to follow physics more closely. First: they're pendulums, so they need to swing at least 4 times before resting. Second: they follow gravity, so in the side shot they need to hang vertically.

One word about presentation: since youtube has a clumsy interface, short scenes like this might be repeated up to 3 times, and have one second of still image on both ends.

slowtiger wrote:This already is really good. You know your movements and your timing.

Now to achieve perfection ...

- Every time the fighter gets into a hold, energy vanishes. This is impossible, as you know, in real physics. Thy this: sword reaches end position, next frame it gets just a bit farther (one swordwidth or so), next two frames it gets back to final position. You just can't get any extremity or sword into full stop from a swing, it always will swing a bit further until the momentum ist absorbed by the muscles.

- There's strobing in the fast swings, which is impossible to avoid with such broad movements of a slim object. Since we can't use smaller increments than a whole frame, we need to cram more positions into one frame. You could use multiple sword images, or a smear, or a combination of both, for just one or two frames. (Should be a separate layer.)

- The two pigtails or whatever you call that need to follow physics more closely. First: they're pendulums, so they need to swing at least 4 times before resting. Second: they follow gravity, so in the side shot they need to hang vertically.

One word about presentation: since youtube has a clumsy interface, short scenes like this might be repeated up to 3 times, and have one second of still image on both ends.

thanks alot for all the information will be experimenting in a bit

Here is the WIP 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMiPE61Y0Yk

I added the first attacker and made some adjustments

Ah, improvement! I see where you followed my advice. That triple sword at 00:00:04 makes a really nice impression.

I'm not sure, but I think the 2nd fighter slows down the scene. He's doing 5 steps now and then sinks down in the same speed. Try to get him in with only 2 steps.
- Adjust his path so he approaches diagonally, not straight, thus not blocking our hero from sight.
- I know that sound will make everything believable, but I'd like to see a stronger physical reaction to his death. Right now he just sinks down. I think he should react to that blow, maybe avoid it (cringing a bit). Think of him as a string under tension - which is cut with the sword - so all his body parts lose tension. (Ha - let me lecture about sword fights! As if I knew anything about it!)
- Shouldn't the hero have some follow-through with that sword's deadly blow? Right now he just holds it into the attacker's path. But he's doing a cut, right? So I think you should continue his arm movement to the left, having his arm outstretched sideways a bit, and the swords tip pointing a bit towards us.
- Very important: let the hero make eye contact with his attacker!

I can't add to Slowtigers advice - but I think the smear REALLY works... well done I think with your animations this new trick will serve you well.

thanks- until recently I had no idea how to do animation smears and whatnot so I'm still learning

kellz5460 wrote:thanks- until recently I had no idea how to do animation smears and whatnot so I'm still learning

Looks even better.

I think someone here introducted me to smears and here is a really interesting tumbler blog I follow incase you haven't seen it.

http://animationsmears.tumblr.com/

I believe that was posted by slowtiger originally - very interesting!

In doing a smear of a fast moving object you need to use the object's colours. You may add a reflection, but only at the position a real sword in mid-swing would have one.

You could create one basic multiple/smear as bitmap (best done as a plain circle), then distort it perspectively to integrate it in your scene. Something like this:



In this raw example (just hastily done in photoshop) the swing starts at left - it's always the end position you do completely, everything inbetween just needs to be suggested.

slowtiger wrote:In doing a smear of a fast moving object you need to use the object's colours. You may add a reflection, but only at the position a real sword in mid-swing would have one.

You could create one basic multiple/smear as bitmap (best done as a plain circle), then distort it perspectively to integrate it in your scene. Something like this:



In this raw example (just hastily done in photoshop) the swing starts at left - it's always the end position you do completely, everything inbetween just needs to be suggested.

holy cow! this is it- wow thx alot- I have to learn how to do these things but I never learned how to draw objects in motion like this- really thanks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVWGBCOYGO4

Added another attacker- changed some things

Two things, that are more preferential things that I'm used to in my own animation.

-The entire point of using extra images to blur frames together is to allow the eyes to paste together very fast movements, a bit like actual motion blur. However, I find that to be far too cheap of a solution. A better solution is to manually bridge the gaps in fast movement by drawing in bridge frames. In 3D, where I first learned to do this, this was accomplished by using squash and stretch and 3D mathematical motion blur. With Anime Studio, you can simply do some nifty point animation to bridge the frames if needed. I find smears much more appealing than using multiples in the cases of really, really fast singular motions such as a sword slash.

-I feel as if either the angle of the shot or the pose is too weak on the first slash. There isn't that great of a change in position of the sword from the first post to the finishing pose. I almost feel as if the sword should be pointing towards the camera, giving some feeling of perspective.

Purely just animation wise, I feel as if you need to let go a bit and let Anime Studio do some of the tweening. Here's a small bit of animation I put together using just your keys on the sword.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNiEmgfh5y0