Hi there, sorry about not posting for the past few days, I was quite busy with finishing up at my job before I start the new one next week. Needless to say I am super excited and really looking forward to start this new adventure with the animation team at Torus. It will be a great opportunity to learn more about the games industry and how the production pipeline actually works.
After my last post about the pregnant walk cycle, I felt like even though the idea is different and holds a lot of challenges, I needed to concentrate on simple things. It’s very easy to get distracted and side tracked when you experiment and sometimes you need to be disciplined and pull yourself straight. After all the idea is to practice the basics and I started to feel like I was not in touch anymore with what I was doing. Finding good reference was pretty hard so in the meantime I decided put that test on hold until I would feel a little more confident with my work-flow.
So, after a lot of coffee and two long nights I managed to get started on the next Jason Ryan tutorial. This time I am tackling the side step. As you could see, I added two more steps in order to break the evenness of the cycle and to make it slightly different to the one Jason did.
I am also adding the reference footage I took to study the timing, I tried to vary the poses a little bit so it won’t look and feel too even. Oh and yes I know I look like a goof ball!
Hey Mate… I see that you are having fun shooting video reference!
It’s very useful nowadays and i find it’s one of my greatest tools while animating…
a few notes from your test.. at first glance (without watching your reference vid yet) it looked cool to me and there only was some spacing, arcs and timing problems.. but afterwards i could see that your ups and downs were a bit off considering the video of yourself doing it… check the arcs on your head and center of mass.. they go down and up.. their arcs are from down to up not from up to down like your flipbook test…. also scrub your video refefence and notice that just before changing direction to the side goes screen left (or right) and does the first step before switching sides..
video reference is very powerful and i am pretty sure you will know how to squeeze it to the limit!
all the best!
Hey Avner,
Not looking too bad… The timing doesn’t feel too bad… I like the second half more than the first… I’m not sure if this is a cycle or not… but the second half felt more natural (a little slower).
Our studio was lucky enough to watch a presentation by Shawn Kelly on Transformers yesterday. In the presntation he talked about how he timed out the speed the robot would move and also how long he would take for weight shifts… he said he actually tries to visualise it before taking any reference… It was interesting to note that in his thumbnails he always takes down the frame numbers… so things are happening at the right time… a lot of this he got from the reference… but a lot of it he puts down himself… from experience… So yeah, his shots on Transformers had great weight… it felt spot on… everything felt really wieghty… I guess that’s why he is so fanatical about putting down frame numbers with his thumbnails… He made the point that often times he wouldn’t give himself enough time for weight transitions…and often times he’d have to go back and give more time for the change in direction etc…
So I learned a lot from that… especially with regards to weight.
So what I’m saying is that the side to side is working, it just feels as though there’s not enough wieght there… know what I mean? Maybe a few more frames to easy out from the extremes… feels too snappy through there… Maybe simply the arcs of the hands, also… it feels a little too busy… it feels simpler in your reference…
That was the only two things that caught my eye… the rest seems good.
Good work on this Avner.
Aaron