As part of a walk cycle triplet, Including a happy man, a sad man, and a flirty woman, I have just finished my 'Sad man" walk cycle. This is the first walk cycle Ive done that has had to show any real obvious emotion. I used Flash to do this as its a very time effective way of animating. It took roughly 4 Hours all in all. I used a technique in which I actually did the cycle 3 times, one as a rough key poses, one cleaning the poses up, and a final to clean it all together and add a background. I'm going to include all 3 sections in the post.
Concept art never ceases to impress and inspire me, so I've been trying to do some of my own. So far its not going too well, however I can still see significant improvement from when I first started doing them, which is a good feeling. Im still trying to concentrate on just getting the lighting right really, without adding too much detail for now. Today I did a 4 hour piece of some weird, sky, tower, space thing. Overall Im quite pleased but still needs work.
(Ive included development pics as well as the finished piece at the bottom)
After finally finished the actual animation process, I thought I'd reflect of the how the whole project went. Although in truth I delayed starting on this project, it has been a really interesting experience. As I explained in the last post, I've really enjoyed actually animating to music. Music is really crucial to me in all my work in terms of inspiration and so on, and I found it a very natural way of animating. I also found watching it back and creating movement that followed a beat really satisfying.
I chose the process of stop-motion (at 25fps, frame by frame) because after playing around with other tests and methods, I feel like we haven't had a real chance to actually 'play' yet with stop motion, so it seemed like a good chance to get involved with that. Having done a bit of stop motion before, I also knew a few tricks and methods which had worked before. I used a programme called iStopmotion 3 (http://www.boinx.com/istopmotion/mac/) which is a really great piece of software (for only £35!). Its simple, but also very powerful it what you can achieve as an end product compared to other stop motion programmes. A very handy part of this is that it allows you to view the sound file as you animate, which really helps marry up the animation process with the music and the timing.
Although I feel like the end result was a overall successes, there are plenty of things that I am now critical of now its finished. For one I wish I had used a different space to animate it, as I chose the kitchen as it seemed to fit the whole theme about 'fruit' nicely, however there was a lot of daylight that leaked in from time to time which gave away my shadow throughout the animation. While this isn't a game ruiner, it is clearly visible, and a bit of a rookie mistake. I also discovered that making fruit do what you want it to do with limited materials is a very hard thing, as its slippery and sometimes heavy (melons) enough not to keep its own weight up in certain angles.
While animating (which took roughly 20 hours of actual animating time) I thought it would be interesting and a bit of fun to time-lapse myself doing the process. Using just my iPhone and a free app called 'iMotion HD' (https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/imotion-hd/id421365625?mt=8), I created a 1 minute time-lapse, which actually proved to be quite interesting as if you watch carefully, you can see the animation unravel before your eyes on the computer screen, and also shows a 'behind the scene' look at some of the crude and basic tricks I used to keep certain fruits still as they danced.
And here is the Final thing (excluding tests) Enjoy.
This project so far has been far more challenging that I anticipated. Firstly, the fact that the brief is so loose brings undisclosed problems in coming up with an idea. Having decided to work with fruit has also been far more challegening that I first thought. Seeing as the fruit has a tendency to decay/slide around while doing a stop motion is pretty infuriating, however its all starting to come together. On a brighter note, really enjoyed working with sound (music) as a guide to be creative with. I feel like this is a natural strong point for me, and will definitely want to play around with this sort of experiment again.
Set up so far (Images)
In the next post regarding this project, I will upload a short timelapse of me working and animating on this project, aswell as the finished piece.
Came across a really interesting animation piece done by a french student (I think). This piece has given me alot of inspiration for the experimental animation project, as it works around animating in time to a soundtrack. would love to know how they made this so fluid and smooth.
Heres just a quick post of a 'fat' walk cycle Ive done over the weekend.
I decided to use flash for this, and actually quite enjoyed it, however found it slower than just cell animation. I didn't use any rigs, just frame by frame.
