Blogging from the mother country

Yoyo. I finally have time to post some of my animation work for "The Last Trophy".


I just finished my first scene. THE first scene in the film, so the characters need too look good. Here are some of the shots.

The Dance is finished!

Rotoscoping. Takes. Time....
And thats all i have to say about that.

Dance!

For my involvement in the "Inbetween" project, jake has asked me to animate a couple dancing.
The male character is going to be big and strong looking. The woman short and fat.

I had a hard time visualising a dance in my head that looked good, had good poses and timing.
I looked at alot of waltz tutorials on youtube to get the basics of footmovement for a classic dancestyle. I decided to do the dance in maya with two rigs that looks a bit like the characters.
Then when i have an ok dance, ill draw over each frame to make the characters look like they are supposed to.

Here is the dance i made so far.

Running better

Just improved the run cycle a little.

Monkeys are horses

I was wrong!!!!!! monkeys doesnt run like cats and dogs at all! they bounce off the ground the same way a horse does....
And the same way us humans do actually. Try it. Try running on all four and you will see.
So i had to do a new run cycle. And this way is much harder to animate.
Here is my first attempt:

Bapp test run cycle animation motion ocean

Matt finished his wonderful rig for Bap, so now i am gonna have fun playing with it, getting to know it, in order to animate effectively with it.
With Matts help, we ironed out some kinks and then it was time to test animate!



From previous knowledge of how all our four legged friends move, i know that they fly stretched out, catches every "leap" with their front "legs" and actually "LEAPS" with their back legs.
The top animation is from the previous one i did.
now im going to do the same thing, but with minimal effort and adjustments.

First going to put bap in a pose i know is going to be there. since i know he is not a horse, he will be flying with legs and arms stretched out from his body. so thats the pose ill start with.















The next keyframe should be where he catches with his arms at which point his legs should be bent as they are still on their way forward to continue momentum :)
And well put it on frame 5.




THEN, the next keyframe would be the first one`s opposite... sort of. Where hes in between legs, and in "mid air".
And well put this one on frame 10.
(back legs moving forward (momentum) and front legs semi backwards as if they just forced the whole body through the air (which is exactly what they did).




Then we need the back legs touching the ground.



Notice that his butt should be close to the ground, but his torso further up. This is because this keyframe is the exact moment where he pushes off the ground to go into the next frame aka the last frame aka the first frame :P
Now just give him a bit of body movement and BOOM... run cycle!




Ok its pretty bad at the moment, but its just to show that you can put together a run cycle relatively quick. But this one would need a LOT of improvement. and tweaking.

Anyway, we are still on the "testing-rigs-phase", so im itching to get to animate something proper sooon!

20000011

Happy new year!

Thought i needed to do some animating, so i did two small ones today. One fat guy jumping and another guy dancing :)