Ok here's what I came up with trying to adopt your suggestions, it's definitely a slower, more deliberate sequence. Anyway, here it is, make of it what you will
Ty mustang, I'm trying to do as much of this is possible day to day b/c I've pretty much gone full steam ahead with this idea and it's like 'yeah ok I have to get to a professional standard before me and my partner die of no money'. Obviously it's nowhere near as bad as that hehe (and frankly once/if a company will take me, I'd be their 24/7 animation bitch pro bono if it meant I got to make games).
Anyway what I'm saying is, I start this 3D animation/modeling diploma in September-ish and I want to enter the program with a somersaulting back-flip and learn the crap out of this trade, so it's very nice to hear that I'm improving, and every scrap of feedback is appreciated (I've learned from lurking here the last 5 years or whatever that the best thing anyone can do in AC is just listen to what the amazing artists here tell them)
Thought I'd post some models here too that are related to the character I was animating before (He's my best friends Dungeons and Dragons character in the games I dungeon master and over the years hes become my go-to doodle pretty much)
This is all done in MAX then put in zbrush (which I suck at) to play about with some more
Spoiler'd for H-scroll on some monitors and it's not animation so not part of the main thread
the last one looks heaps better than your previous attaempts but this slower one is still not creating the illusion of weight in that hammer.
i think the swing down should be a lot faster. for an object that heavy it would be almost impossible to maintain that speed when the hammer swings down.
i also think that step forward on his right foot when the camera shudder happens looks really wierd. for the dude to be able to do that the foot should have less elevation or more of the wieght from the hammer should be ont he other side of his body.
i know it's a bit late now but i definietly thing starting to animate "traditionally" (even if you just draw straight into flash and animate frame by frame. fuck off motion and shape tweens just get an understanding of timeing. break the action then rope it back a little so that you understand how fast/slow you can make objects) would be incredibly fucking usefull for you. once you have an understanding of all the dundamentals.
1. Squash and stretch
2. Anticipation
3. Staging
4. Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose
5. Follow Through and Overlapping Action
6. Slow In and Slow Out
7. Arcs
8. Secondary Action
9. Timing
10. Exaggeration
11. Solid Drawing (same or different as Weight)
12. Appeal
(taken straight from http://www.frankandollie.com/PhysicalAnimation.html)
once you understand all of them then i think you be able to compently anumate in 3d. at the moment i think you're just relying on the computer to inbetween for you. which is bad. you could probably get a job with this skill set though. there are a LOT of floaty 3d anims around.
I do actually have flash and am pretty familiar with the program, so if you reckon doing some 2d basics would help then that's definitely something I can go with.
When you say it's too late to animate traditionally, what exactly do you mean? I've only been learning 3d for a few months and those first couple in the OP were literally my first go at 3d animation on a character so I'm 100% open to new suggestions, techniques, or going back to the drawing board. I am a blank canvas! Paint me with wisdom.
You think the latest, slowest version was the best right? (Just want to make sure I'm not getting confused). As for the hammer coming down fast, it's about 6 frames from hammer vertical over head, to first ground contact, should I squash that even further, get it down on the ground in like 3 frames? Or do you mean it's coming up to the top of the swing too slowly?
I'm really trying to get away from that floaty 'tween' feel, should I be making almost no use of MAX filling in frames for me?. That hammer animation is pretty much 200 keyframes at this point, but I'm starting the animations by setting the keyposes with gaps in between and then going back and refining them, is this a shitty workflow?
Here's closeup video of the right foot to show it a bit better, I agree that it (and the other foot) are not handled very well, It's meant to be that he sort of, falls on his right knee with the jerk of the hammer.
if you have flash and a tablet (or whatever) i strongly suggest tooling around there bvefor coming over in 3d. the big trap in 3d is producing floaty crap and relying too heavily on the computer.
working in flash would allow you to see and utilise each individual frame. hand drawing them i think would really help you get a grasp of what needs to be happening when it comes to weight, spacing, timing. etc
the bouncing ball animation. i know it's be raped to death. but man. if you're only months into animation. seriously bust it out. see how much squash and stretch you can get away with. see how many frames you can pile up the to of the bounce (top of the arcs) tool around. experiment. really exaggurate everything brake the limits so that you can understand them. find little animations and activities like this to do. do a walk cycle. focus on each frame of the cycle instead of worryign about keys in 3d.
yeah. the slower (latest version) was the best you could still push that swing though. it's not hitting the ground fast enough from about the head. i think the hammer cusions niclyy when it comes to the top of the arc near the head.
forget that max can fill in frames for you. block it of so that all the poses just jerk to eachother. this will allow you do move the keys up and down and decide how many frames to hold each key. it's how traditional shiz is line tested. i think learning about traditrional inbetweening would help you immensly. i know it's frowned upon here but, find some torrents of anim videos from practicing animators (you could pay for them, if you wanted) just a question (may have already been covered) how many FPS are you animating at?
i certainly wouldn't say that pose to pose animating is a shitty workflow. it may feel a bit unnatural. but i think it is the best way to do it.
an animator i think you should check out is Jason Ryan. most recently he's worked on monsters vs aliens. i think his 3d work process would really help you out.
we all used this is class http://ludichrist.deviantart.com/art/Animating-in-3D-103183824 this is a video of the process of my mates stuff. mate did this... i thinki you get the point. we worked all the keys to the dialogue in flash then went in and inbetweened manually and as you can see, took it into maya (pretty sure you could do it in max too) and set it as an image plane so that we could reference our 2d anim when we were setting the keys for our 3d, this also ensured our anim didn't become floaty.
edit: the right leg looks almost too nimble. it shouldn't come bake up that quickly. don't be afraid of offsetting the timing on limbs.
For this animation I blocked out the frames like you said, doing it all by keyframes (did about 30 frames) then I started spreading them about for the full animation. I know this isn't quite the process you were getting at but I just started getting impatient I guess. I think next post I'm going to do a 2d flash animation and get simple.
Ok I did this big jumping animation based off a martial arts video I thought was cool, I'm kind of sick to death of it now so here at 5 in the morning I am saying 'goodbye jumping animation, tomorrow I shall find out what to change about you based on the feedback in this thread, and hopefully I will not hate you'
Hey great thread man, I don't really know anything about 3D animation but I can already see your making good progress, keep up the good work. Like the most recent vid, got a nice dramatic flow to it.
pogo mudder on
what a work of art is man, and the most boring choice you can make
Hey there! I'm an animator too. My track adviser worked at Pixar and I wanted to share a few things he taught us. I'm not sure how your process goes exactly, but our first step is blocking in the main movements. We focus on the movement and timing overall and then add all the overlapping. It's kind of like how you have to flesh out a painting. The details aren't going to mean anything if the basics aren't correct.
I don't know if you've been using your curve editor, but getting to know it will definitely put you ahead in your class. My adviser suggests a piece of butcher paper placed over your monitor and gently draw in your arcs with china marker. It's kind of the same concept as r-jasper's friend's.
Also, reference is good! This is a field where you're re-creating a believable image..."The Illusion of Life" (great book for Disney animation lovers, btw) A good reference means the more you have to work from. Especially for games, because you don't have the same amount of movement play in Gears of War as opposed to Toy Story. It helps you get your arcs and timing. You also have to improvise sometimes! We had to find out how to reference little Luxo (the Pixar lamp) and that was weird. We used our arms in this sock puppet like motion, haha.
I always encourage 2d practice, but my adviser never learned how and he worked on quite a few movies. He's looked at my traditional work and said "I wish I knew how to draw." Craziness! Anyway...It's more important to plan it out- get a stopwatch and time yourself over and over and convert it into frames, study everything, focus on your arcs and acting, become aware of your body!
Sorry that was kind of long, hope it helped a little.
Jessicones on
I don't think you're happy enough! That's right! I'll teach you to be happy! I'll teach your grandmother to suck eggs! Now, boys and girls, let's try it again!
Thanks a lot Jessicones, I was reading your thread yesterday and I started making a post like 'holy shit you're really good, I hope you were lying when you said you wanted to be an animator b/c I don't want competition this talented', (I then didn't post b/c it seemed like kind of a negative thing to say hehe) so it's really cool to see you in my thread
I actually tried to get my girlfriend to film me jumping about as a reference, but the video camera was dead so I gotta wait till I buy batteries tomorrow. However I am definitely gonna follow that advice (that'll be even better than stopwatching right?)
As for the curves stuff, I have done almost nothing with it after reading some stuff on the net, and frankly that is criminally stupid of me, so I'm not going to touch a new animation without a reference of myself I can use and curves editor (plus I'll try that paper on the monitor thing)
TY for the advice, really wish I was in school already like you, can't wait for my course to start!!!
How cartoony are you trying to go with this one? Are you going for a totally cartoonish leap, or more or a superheroic/VFX style where things are obviously exaggerated, but still feel believable?
If it's the latter, you will want to eliminate the obvious hang at the peak of the leap. Also, if you're going for a parkour/freerunning sort of flip at the end there, you probably want to have less of a break between the landing and the flip.
It's my understanding that doing flips on landing are sort of a flashier way to do what a roll is supposed to do- maintain the momentum of the body horizontally so that it can be slowed down and controlled, rather than doing a straight vertical landing where all your body's force and weight just smash your shins into the concrete and you end up with broken legs. That's sort of what you've got going on- Jump, LAND <pause> FLIP <pause> hop, walk. Unless you've got some really strong Muy Thai boxer shinbones or are a cartoon character, that's probably not the best of ideas.
I can see the argument for animating as you have though- it shows a lot of weight, and the poses are clear and easy to read. In a cartoon or if it's a robot or an invincible superhero dude you might want to still go that route for those reasons.
However, if we're assuming the character is only meant to be slightly exaggerated in style, what should probably be happening is a near constant horizontal motion throughout the landing to well beyond the flip, where the momentum can be transferred into a run, and then can be slowed down properly without injury.
If this video below is right, the bend at the knees should probably still be at an oblique angle when the guy pushes off the ground from the balls of his feet to turn the motion into a flip rather than a roll. Since this is using existing momentum for the flip, there doesn't need to be a lot of additional muscular action in the legs occurring to create enough force to perform the action- I would guess that most of the additional force comes from the lower leg muscles acting on the feet to create the push off, rather than the upper leg muscles pushing on the lower legs.
(I'd search harder for a video with an actual flip landing to confirm that I'm not just speaking out my ass here, but I only have so much tolerance for wading through videos of high schoolers doing doing cartwheels to nu-metal before I get a headache. I'm just going off of memory from what I've seen before, so I might be wrong here...but I've played a lot of Mirror's Edge and that makes me an expert, right? )
(It's the first move of the video about 15 seconds in or so, but you should recognise it anyway hopefully)
I will give a full response a little later but I'm kind of on the move right now so I don't have time for a full reply, I'll be back ASAP for a proper response!
Cool. Yeah, I can see which one you're talking about.
On the landing the dude doesn't seem to bend his legs much beyond a standing position before flipping, which sort of goes along with what I was thinking. Also it looks like there's a lot more consistent momentum from the running jump into the leap here over what you've got, letting that momentum and springboard (at least I think it's a springboard) do more of the work, over using direct muscular force by bending and straightening the legs.
You are dead on about the legs/knees, looking close-up on my animation he goes down so low his ass is touching the back of his feet, and this definitely isn't right and would break his legs. Technically I was going for a completely realistic animation since I based it of real life footage (however the guy in the footage is practically super-human, that ninja shit they do is awesome).
I'm gonna mess with it now for an hour or two and see if I can make a decent improvement before I start think about a new exercise
Ok here's a closer up bide of just the landing section, this the right direction I think (I think it flows more realistically, it's certainly closer to the reference, but it does loose a little weight in favor of momentum)
Would you mind taking a look at the video reference (It's 2:40 seconds into the video) and see if you can spot anything specific as well as general floatyness? I already noticed that for some reason I did an extra flip at the end (obviously too long staring at a 10 second section of film hehe)
Whew, back from a week of funeral attending and not having a computer around, anyhoo, I'm back now so more animations coming up! I'm gonna do a little 2d flash stuff i think
The bounce feels pretty good, but if you are going for a somewhat naturalistic bounce, it shouldn't travel so far on the third arc. As it bounces farther and farther, it shouldn't travel quite so far.
BTW, in case anyone hasn't posted this yet, you should definitely get Richard Williams' "The Animators Survival Kit" if you don't already have it. In class, we refer to it as the animators bible.
omegalbagel on
The line between genius and insanity is so thin, how does one know when they cross it, or to which side they're crossing?
The bounce feels a lot better now, more solid. However, on the third contact with the ground, the ball sort of stops for a split second. This kind of screws with the illusion of the bounce.
Right now, I'm in a Junior Animation II course. I'm in my third year of going to school as an animator, I primarily work in 2D, mostly flash.
omegalbagel on
The line between genius and insanity is so thin, how does one know when they cross it, or to which side they're crossing?
0
RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
edited April 2009
You're leaving the ball in contact with the ground too long - the squash and then the stretch as it leaves or the stretch right before contact should be the only two frames it contacts the ground, or else it looks like it sticks.
Also, there's no indication of movement when it hits the slingshot thing - it just vanishes. Give the viewers some indication of movement or direction.
yeah everything in those 2 posts makes sense, I think I left it for so long on the ground bounces b/c I was thinking about earlier in the thread where somebody said something like 'experiment with how far you can push the deforms' or something like that, but I think as it is, it make the ball look sort of gooey, or not bouncy enough anyway. I'll give it a bit more bounce, in the meantime,
Regardless of referencing from Street Fighter, it's great to see how much time you're putting into animating. Plus, to learn he principles of animation, referencing and studying others work is the way to go.
In my character animation class, we would frequently do frame-by-frame studies of classic animations. There's nothing wrong with looking to others to help you learn, just don't reference a hadouken and turn it in for a class project as if you invented it. That's when people will be pissed. lol
omegalbagel on
The line between genius and insanity is so thin, how does one know when they cross it, or to which side they're crossing?
Spent ages doing some street fighter type 3d animation then got too burned out to finish it today so I doodled a guy firing a gun, and there's gunna be a guy getting shot too, but it's 1:15 and time to go to bed so here's the WIP, this is very WIP WIP WIP WIP WIP
Added the other character to the previous animation, still not sure what this is really, b/c it was a doodle, so maybe this is a far as it will go, anyway!
My bloody graphics card melted, and I had to reformat all my hard drives and stuff sooooooo that's sucked. BUT I've got stuff back up and running and here's what I had been messing about with before it crashed horribly and I had to take a few days off.
I think I'm going to think for a bit before doing anything else b/c I don't want to just keep pushing out random jump things. I've been asking the shotgun sunrise guys (who I did some modeling and animation for) to let me animate one of their up-coming boss characters for the game, and that would be really really cool, other than that I want to try and work on some proper exercises and stuff to make some focused headway.
Ok I'm doing monster animation for shotgun sunrise (Half Life 2 mod) and here's the walkcycle WIP I've been doing this evening, lotta work to do on it but here it is:
Managed to get the model+animations in game!! May not seem like a very big deal but believe me, having it work in 3D MAX and having it work in a game engine are two veeeeeeery different things.
I actually had to completely re-skin and re-rig it to work in-game so the walking animation is 100% new, I'll post the MAX render of it later on (if anybodies interested! I haven't had too much feedback of late)
I dont know to much of the detail about getting the models to work in game mate. Iknow there is allot of coding and math behind it. Does the program you use do most of it for you? is it actually interactive?
Might help 'sell' yourself if your able to add things in like the robot actually chasing after you, moving in the direction you are so its more responsive to the environment.
Umm, I guess I wasn't clear enough about what this is for?
That model will be fully programmed to work as a monster that you fight in a game. I guess you didn't recognize it from the video but that game is Half Life 2, which definitely does not just figure it out for you unfortunately. Having the zombie in the game not being interactive is me seeing if I can actually get my animations to compile properly in an engine rather than just in max.
The teams programmer will be writing code for the monster when all the animation files are completed.
The only reason I posted a video of the model animating in game is that compiling the models and animations to work properly in the game engine is actually a very arduous process that involves niggly technical details with hours of trial and error, hunting down the ways this game engine handles animation, and how the exporter program handles bones, helpers, etc, and having the engine recognize all the elements of the animation rig.
Oh, and here is a render of the latest walkcycle (as previously mentioned I had to completely re-do the walk b/c the rig I'd used previously would not compile into source engine)
Righty-ho, I made the 'fruit fucker humping his way towards the player' animation today. For those not familiar with the fruit fucker (even though your on the Penny Arcade forum) He is a kitchen appliance/robot that fucks fruit via a chute on his crotch. As you can see, the zombie in fruit fucker amour is attempting a similar move,
Posts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0rU0M95RIA
Anyway what I'm saying is, I start this 3D animation/modeling diploma in September-ish and I want to enter the program with a somersaulting back-flip and learn the crap out of this trade, so it's very nice to hear that I'm improving, and every scrap of feedback is appreciated (I've learned from lurking here the last 5 years or whatever that the best thing anyone can do in AC is just listen to what the amazing artists here tell them)
Thought I'd post some models here too that are related to the character I was animating before (He's my best friends Dungeons and Dragons character in the games I dungeon master and over the years hes become my go-to doodle pretty much)
This is all done in MAX then put in zbrush (which I suck at) to play about with some more
Spoiler'd for H-scroll on some monitors and it's not animation so not part of the main thread
i think the swing down should be a lot faster. for an object that heavy it would be almost impossible to maintain that speed when the hammer swings down.
i also think that step forward on his right foot when the camera shudder happens looks really wierd. for the dude to be able to do that the foot should have less elevation or more of the wieght from the hammer should be ont he other side of his body.
i know it's a bit late now but i definietly thing starting to animate "traditionally" (even if you just draw straight into flash and animate frame by frame. fuck off motion and shape tweens just get an understanding of timeing. break the action then rope it back a little so that you understand how fast/slow you can make objects) would be incredibly fucking usefull for you. once you have an understanding of all the dundamentals.
2. Anticipation
3. Staging
4. Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose
5. Follow Through and Overlapping Action
6. Slow In and Slow Out
7. Arcs
8. Secondary Action
9. Timing
10. Exaggeration
11. Solid Drawing (same or different as Weight)
12. Appeal
(taken straight from http://www.frankandollie.com/PhysicalAnimation.html)
When you say it's too late to animate traditionally, what exactly do you mean? I've only been learning 3d for a few months and those first couple in the OP were literally my first go at 3d animation on a character so I'm 100% open to new suggestions, techniques, or going back to the drawing board. I am a blank canvas! Paint me with wisdom.
You think the latest, slowest version was the best right? (Just want to make sure I'm not getting confused). As for the hammer coming down fast, it's about 6 frames from hammer vertical over head, to first ground contact, should I squash that even further, get it down on the ground in like 3 frames? Or do you mean it's coming up to the top of the swing too slowly?
I'm really trying to get away from that floaty 'tween' feel, should I be making almost no use of MAX filling in frames for me?. That hammer animation is pretty much 200 keyframes at this point, but I'm starting the animations by setting the keyposes with gaps in between and then going back and refining them, is this a shitty workflow?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXYSBhzFF2w
working in flash would allow you to see and utilise each individual frame. hand drawing them i think would really help you get a grasp of what needs to be happening when it comes to weight, spacing, timing. etc
the bouncing ball animation. i know it's be raped to death. but man. if you're only months into animation. seriously bust it out. see how much squash and stretch you can get away with. see how many frames you can pile up the to of the bounce (top of the arcs) tool around. experiment. really exaggurate everything brake the limits so that you can understand them. find little animations and activities like this to do. do a walk cycle. focus on each frame of the cycle instead of worryign about keys in 3d.
yeah. the slower (latest version) was the best you could still push that swing though. it's not hitting the ground fast enough from about the head. i think the hammer cusions niclyy when it comes to the top of the arc near the head.
forget that max can fill in frames for you. block it of so that all the poses just jerk to eachother. this will allow you do move the keys up and down and decide how many frames to hold each key. it's how traditional shiz is line tested. i think learning about traditrional inbetweening would help you immensly. i know it's frowned upon here but, find some torrents of anim videos from practicing animators (you could pay for them, if you wanted) just a question (may have already been covered) how many FPS are you animating at?
i certainly wouldn't say that pose to pose animating is a shitty workflow. it may feel a bit unnatural. but i think it is the best way to do it.
an animator i think you should check out is Jason Ryan. most recently he's worked on monsters vs aliens. i think his 3d work process would really help you out.
we all used this is class http://ludichrist.deviantart.com/art/Animating-in-3D-103183824 this is a video of the process of my mates stuff. mate did this... i thinki you get the point. we worked all the keys to the dialogue in flash then went in and inbetweened manually and as you can see, took it into maya (pretty sure you could do it in max too) and set it as an image plane so that we could reference our 2d anim when we were setting the keys for our 3d, this also ensured our anim didn't become floaty.
edit: the right leg looks almost too nimble. it shouldn't come bake up that quickly. don't be afraid of offsetting the timing on limbs.
Ok I did this big jumping animation based off a martial arts video I thought was cool, I'm kind of sick to death of it now so here at 5 in the morning I am saying 'goodbye jumping animation, tomorrow I shall find out what to change about you based on the feedback in this thread, and hopefully I will not hate you'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dT3pf_l2L-g
I don't know if you've been using your curve editor, but getting to know it will definitely put you ahead in your class. My adviser suggests a piece of butcher paper placed over your monitor and gently draw in your arcs with china marker. It's kind of the same concept as r-jasper's friend's.
Also, reference is good! This is a field where you're re-creating a believable image..."The Illusion of Life" (great book for Disney animation lovers, btw) A good reference means the more you have to work from. Especially for games, because you don't have the same amount of movement play in Gears of War as opposed to Toy Story. It helps you get your arcs and timing. You also have to improvise sometimes! We had to find out how to reference little Luxo (the Pixar lamp) and that was weird. We used our arms in this sock puppet like motion, haha.
I always encourage 2d practice, but my adviser never learned how and he worked on quite a few movies. He's looked at my traditional work and said "I wish I knew how to draw." Craziness! Anyway...It's more important to plan it out- get a stopwatch and time yourself over and over and convert it into frames, study everything, focus on your arcs and acting, become aware of your body!
Sorry that was kind of long, hope it helped a little.
I actually tried to get my girlfriend to film me jumping about as a reference, but the video camera was dead so I gotta wait till I buy batteries tomorrow. However I am definitely gonna follow that advice (that'll be even better than stopwatching right?)
As for the curves stuff, I have done almost nothing with it after reading some stuff on the net, and frankly that is criminally stupid of me, so I'm not going to touch a new animation without a reference of myself I can use and curves editor (plus I'll try that paper on the monitor thing)
TY for the advice, really wish I was in school already like you, can't wait for my course to start!!!
Update ASAP
How cartoony are you trying to go with this one? Are you going for a totally cartoonish leap, or more or a superheroic/VFX style where things are obviously exaggerated, but still feel believable?
If it's the latter, you will want to eliminate the obvious hang at the peak of the leap. Also, if you're going for a parkour/freerunning sort of flip at the end there, you probably want to have less of a break between the landing and the flip.
It's my understanding that doing flips on landing are sort of a flashier way to do what a roll is supposed to do- maintain the momentum of the body horizontally so that it can be slowed down and controlled, rather than doing a straight vertical landing where all your body's force and weight just smash your shins into the concrete and you end up with broken legs. That's sort of what you've got going on- Jump, LAND <pause> FLIP <pause> hop, walk. Unless you've got some really strong Muy Thai boxer shinbones or are a cartoon character, that's probably not the best of ideas.
I can see the argument for animating as you have though- it shows a lot of weight, and the poses are clear and easy to read. In a cartoon or if it's a robot or an invincible superhero dude you might want to still go that route for those reasons.
However, if we're assuming the character is only meant to be slightly exaggerated in style, what should probably be happening is a near constant horizontal motion throughout the landing to well beyond the flip, where the momentum can be transferred into a run, and then can be slowed down properly without injury.
If this video below is right, the bend at the knees should probably still be at an oblique angle when the guy pushes off the ground from the balls of his feet to turn the motion into a flip rather than a roll. Since this is using existing momentum for the flip, there doesn't need to be a lot of additional muscular action in the legs occurring to create enough force to perform the action- I would guess that most of the additional force comes from the lower leg muscles acting on the feet to create the push off, rather than the upper leg muscles pushing on the lower legs.
(I'd search harder for a video with an actual flip landing to confirm that I'm not just speaking out my ass here, but I only have so much tolerance for wading through videos of high schoolers doing doing cartwheels to nu-metal before I get a headache. I'm just going off of memory from what I've seen before, so I might be wrong here...but I've played a lot of Mirror's Edge and that makes me an expert, right?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YgmVErJpA0&feature=related
Twitter
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=6459007011438726304&ei=perYSeuAA5ek2ALv67iVDg&q=team+ryouko
(It's the first move of the video about 15 seconds in or so, but you should recognise it anyway hopefully)
I will give a full response a little later but I'm kind of on the move right now so I don't have time for a full reply, I'll be back ASAP for a proper response!
On the landing the dude doesn't seem to bend his legs much beyond a standing position before flipping, which sort of goes along with what I was thinking. Also it looks like there's a lot more consistent momentum from the running jump into the leap here over what you've got, letting that momentum and springboard (at least I think it's a springboard) do more of the work, over using direct muscular force by bending and straightening the legs.
Twitter
You are dead on about the legs/knees, looking close-up on my animation he goes down so low his ass is touching the back of his feet, and this definitely isn't right and would break his legs. Technically I was going for a completely realistic animation since I based it of real life footage (however the guy in the footage is practically super-human, that ninja shit they do is awesome).
I'm gonna mess with it now for an hour or two and see if I can make a decent improvement before I start think about a new exercise
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2M6FqFXw0aI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40ud5XXM8Vw
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=6459007011438726304&ei=perYSeuAA5ek2ALv67iVDg&q=team+ryouko
just an example...
(i apologise if you already know this stuff)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9YU32eJ7_8
The line between genius and insanity is so thin, how does one know when they cross it, or to which side they're crossing?
BTW, in case anyone hasn't posted this yet, you should definitely get Richard Williams' "The Animators Survival Kit" if you don't already have it. In class, we refer to it as the animators bible.
The line between genius and insanity is so thin, how does one know when they cross it, or to which side they're crossing?
And it looks like I can grab a copy of that book for 10 pounds. What course are you doing out of interest?
.....................................................time passing.....................................................
I went and retooled before posting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=148YfJuAa_E
Right now, I'm in a Junior Animation II course. I'm in my third year of going to school as an animator, I primarily work in 2D, mostly flash.
The line between genius and insanity is so thin, how does one know when they cross it, or to which side they're crossing?
Also, there's no indication of movement when it hits the slingshot thing - it just vanishes. Give the viewers some indication of movement or direction.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5B45eH192SE
HADOOOOKEN! (That's really a doodle and clearly referenced from street fighter so I'm not expecting you guys to come up with anything to say!)
In my character animation class, we would frequently do frame-by-frame studies of classic animations. There's nothing wrong with looking to others to help you learn, just don't reference a hadouken and turn it in for a class project as if you invented it. That's when people will be pissed. lol
The line between genius and insanity is so thin, how does one know when they cross it, or to which side they're crossing?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XasS99APjMs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXzixARQx90
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIAzxoCEIsE
I think I'm going to think for a bit before doing anything else b/c I don't want to just keep pushing out random jump things. I've been asking the shotgun sunrise guys (who I did some modeling and animation for) to let me animate one of their up-coming boss characters for the game, and that would be really really cool, other than that I want to try and work on some proper exercises and stuff to make some focused headway.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX2td6CLbGA
This if for when the player knocks the monster over from behind with the melee weapon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXX713U87lE
here's a quick vid I took, sorry about watermark
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov3nxzMHX7g
I actually had to completely re-skin and re-rig it to work in-game so the walking animation is 100% new, I'll post the MAX render of it later on (if anybodies interested! I haven't had too much feedback of late)
Might help 'sell' yourself if your able to add things in like the robot actually chasing after you, moving in the direction you are so its more responsive to the environment.
That model will be fully programmed to work as a monster that you fight in a game. I guess you didn't recognize it from the video but that game is Half Life 2, which definitely does not just figure it out for you unfortunately. Having the zombie in the game not being interactive is me seeing if I can actually get my animations to compile properly in an engine rather than just in max.
This stuff is being made specifically for the Penny Arcade Forums made Mod 'Shotgun Sunrise', here is our MODDB page: http://www.moddb.com/mods/shotgun-sunrise
Here is our thread in Penny Arcade games forums: http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=86166
The teams programmer will be writing code for the monster when all the animation files are completed.
The only reason I posted a video of the model animating in game is that compiling the models and animations to work properly in the game engine is actually a very arduous process that involves niggly technical details with hours of trial and error, hunting down the ways this game engine handles animation, and how the exporter program handles bones, helpers, etc, and having the engine recognize all the elements of the animation rig.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkbASBl6rws
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwVWICF87sU