Pappy And The Big Ball

gnat · Post by **gnat** » Wed Sep 27, 2006 3:17 am

Given my attention span (instant gratification) this is probably about as far as I am going to go with this one.

http://www.myfilehut.com/userfiles/1997 ... igBall.mov

I've learned a lot, and hope to get a better feeling for movement and techniques next time.

Best,

Gnat

J. Baker · Post by **J. Baker** » Wed Sep 27, 2006 3:31 am

That's pretty good gnat!

ingie01 · Post by **ingie01** » Wed Sep 27, 2006 1:11 pm

Animation is HARD! Good job with yours. The dog, the camera movements, terrific! I see where your attention stops, at the point where the lettering starts as a narration.
I love terriers (Terrors)

00moa00 · Post by **00moa00** » Wed Sep 27, 2006 2:31 pm

VERY good ! well done !

i love your design, especially for clouds.

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Wed Sep 27, 2006 5:19 pm

Really well done gnat. Look forward to seeing the rest.

Patmals · Post by **Patmals** » Wed Sep 27, 2006 10:09 pm

Really nice work Gnat

Pappy must be proud to see him 'immortalised' on the ' big screen'!

gnat · Post by **gnat** » Wed Sep 27, 2006 10:32 pm

Patmals wrote:Pappy must be proud to see him 'immortalised' on the ' big screen'!

When it comes to my diddling around with the computer, he's just impatient for me to get done. He's generally poking a ball around the tangle of cables at my feet while he's waiting-- it's like sitting on a washing machine.

Thanks to everybody for the kind words. I may have to go back to doing mash-ups with other videos-- it's a lot of work building the whole environment.

Thanks,

Gnat

Rasheed · Post by **Rasheed** » Wed Sep 27, 2006 11:49 pm

Nice animation. Although a comment about the walk cycle of Pappy, if I may.

I tried to correct the walk cycle to this animation, as good as I could with your animation (I slowed it down to 15 fps):

In your animation, Pappy seems to be sliding instead of walking. I suppose you animated a walk cycle in one place and used translate layer to move the body. However, it is much easier to create a convincing animation by directly animating the walk cycle as it happens on the screen, step-by-step, doing the translation and animation at the same time. I have tried doing just that using the frames of your animation (although there are still some slight flaws in the walk cycle).

The easiest way is to create the contact positions first (where all the paws are just touching the floor). Here's a rough example animation I did. It is not as refined as your dog animation, but the contact positions are much better. This "dog" isn't floating while walking.

It was 16 frames per step, animated at 24 fps.

gnat · Post by **gnat** » Thu Sep 28, 2006 3:03 am

Rasheed wrote:The easiest way is to create the contact positions first (where all the paws are just touching the floor). Here's a rough example animation I did. It is not as refined as your dog animation, but the contact positions are much better. This "dog" isn't floating while walking.

Rasheed,

Thanks. I noticed your recent tests based on the animation guides today, and the issues weren't lost on me. My wife said Pappy looked a bit like he was moonwalking.

Part of my challenge was that I was trying to use reusable Actions-- I don't think this precludes working out the contact positions as part of the action, but I was struggling with the tools and hitches in the walk cycle. There's a section towards the end I was manually animating, and found it much easier to manage the position of the feet with respect to the ground-- things went a lot slower, but I felt a bit more in control.

Regards,

Gnat

Rasheed · Post by **Rasheed** » Thu Sep 28, 2006 10:08 am

Here's an applicable quote from The Animator's Survival Kit (page 101):

Richard Williams wrote:TAKE THE LONG SHORT CUT.

The long way turns out to be shorter.
Because: something usually goes wrong with some clever rabbit's idea for a short cut and it turns out to take even longer trying to fix everything when it goes wrong.

This applied to the animator's assistant, and I guess you could call an animation program just that. Clever software tricks do not always give you the correct result and you could end up doing the whole scene over again. I don't use Actions yet, because I'm not good enough an animator at this moment. And even if I were, I wouldn't use it for my main character, because I'm a firm believer of never duplicating an action in a sequence, but rather do some subtle variations within the sequence (thus animating by hand). I think that's less mechanical and adds more life to your animation. It requires a lot of work, but then, doing animation IS a lot of work. Of course, for the supporting cast I'd use shortcuts like actions if I can get away with that.