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Yeah the weirdest thing about William's work is his obsession with animating on ones, because nobody really does that even in a professional work environment (except with computer animation I guess, where everything is technically on ones). Most things the Japanese do have between 8 and 10 drawings per second. Maybe Disney used to animate on ones, but I'm not sure. I've been learning Maya for the past 10 months, spending a lot of time learning as much as I could about it. This is a short film I finished making back in January: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGAwOuJVDaw I also did this piece of animation for the 11 Second Club: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QSb2S5htas Any critiques you guys have would be helpful, as I'm working on a new film now! Currently rigging the characters.
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Mar 31, 2013 22:54
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Troll: The walk has a bit of a snap when he hits the ground but seems solid otherwise. The jump is very floaty. In part because the timing is off, in part because there is no easing. Both on the anticipation and the going up. Try to be more aggressive with your timing and poses, when he is going up it doesn't really feel like he is pushing himself up. The climb needs some work. Take a look at some reference: http://youtu.be/N70DLM8Az_8?t=2m52s You can see how the whole body is involved in this and how she really needs to push herself up. The movement is also very uneven. There is something nice going on in the little set of jumps, especially the last one. You can still push the timing and easing more. It is a little weird that he is only jumping with one foot. I'm not going over every shot, but the advice is the same. Work on the easing, work on the timing, work on the poses. Try to make the actions more fluid. Avoid that floaty feeling, get into the curve editor and fix that stuff. Watch out the finger animation, hands are very expressive and you are missing out. Finally, be careful with the camera moves, a lot of them are awkward and unnecessary. Overall it is a good first project but perhaps too ambitious. When there is so much to animate you can't really get to polish it quite as much. 11SC: Try to work on your follow throughs. A lot of the body parts are moving and then coming to a sudden stop, especially the hands, the head and the pelvis. They then just float there. Again, watch out your finger animation. The lip synch seems pretty good but there are a few places where you could tighten it up more. Chernabog fucked around with this message at 23:41 on Mar 31, 2013 |
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Mar 31, 2013 23:38
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Thanks! Yeah, I definitely have a ways to go. These criticisms are helpful. I'm going to be attending Sheridan College for their digital character animation program this fall, so I'll be spending basically all my time next year working on this stuff.
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Apr 1, 2013 04:52
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I have a super-dumb question: is there some mode of CG/3D animation which allows you to be somewhat spontaneous? I really like working straight ahead in 2D because of the organic quality of the motion and the ability to go by feel. It seems like 3D is strictly pose-to-pose, but I'm increasingly dissatisfied with the results of that approach even in big-budget features. The system which I hear they use these days in CG is: 1. Plan your scene with thumbnail sketches 2. Block in stepped mode with your keys and breakdowns 3. Move to spline, fix anything which seems hugely wrong 4. Polish Is there some way to like, do motion capture with a sock puppet instead? Because I can make more believable emotional performance in ten seconds with a puppet I ever could hold in my hands than I can in a hundred hours of clicking the little rig handles one at a time.
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Apr 2, 2013 01:54
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whoops, quote is not edit.
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Apr 2, 2013 01:54
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Lucas Martell has a thing he calls the "layered" approach, which is the CG equivalent of straight-ahead animation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azAv4oJsLDQ I've never worked that way and my experience with traditional animation is limited so I'm not sure how much it's actually like straight-ahead animation. This guy over at "Animation Tips and Tricks" says the layered approach is "far more difficult for newer animators, and my advice to anyone who hasn't been professionally animating for a few years already would be to stick with the pose-to-pose approach, using heavy reference, research, thumbnails, etc." https://www.animationtipsandtricks.com/2009/11/what-is-layered-animation-and-how-does.html But I think those two might disagree slightly on what the "layered" approach is. Also I was wondering if I could get feedback from you guys on this animatic. Its for a short film about two monkey-like aliens that are fighting in a "hammerspace" duel, where basically they have the ability to produce hammers from out of nowhere. I want to keep the film short so that it's actually doable, but I don't know if it's something people would actually enjoy watching if it doesn't have a real conclusion. So any input is helpful. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWdJlXnJCa4 Ccs fucked around with this message at 05:01 on Apr 2, 2013 |
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Apr 2, 2013 03:12
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An illustration project had me to go back to completed drawings and add a little animation to them. It was a weird process (I've never really done animation before) but I was pretty happy with how this one in particular turned out:  I had 20 frames to work with and the animation had to loop.
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Apr 2, 2013 11:27
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Is there a cheap alternative to TVPaint? I'm looking for a raster based 2d animation app that's a little less clunky to use than Photoshop for animation. Cheers!
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Apr 2, 2013 23:21
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Short answer: No. Long answer: There are like 10 different versions of Toon Boom now, all of which are different prices and have different feature sets and limitations. It's really confusing, and Toon Boom also has a ton of web sites floating around with their own press releases disguised as "reviews." The highest-tier versions of Toon Boom have decent-ish natural media textures for drawing, but if getting a Disney-ish pencil and painterly look is important to you, nothing compares to TVPaint. Also, Toon Boom uses OpenGL/GPU stuff to display the vectors of the drawings, so if you sketch with lots of little scratchy lines it slows down badly. The lower-tier versions of Toon Boom look like Flash, so harsh vectory lines. There are some Personal Learning Editions you can try to see if you like the features and interface. If you're on Windows, you can use Plastic Animation Paper to do your actual animation, and then do cleanup/color in Photoshop, and compositing in AE or what have you. You could also do this in an old version of Flash, which you can find used. If you're on a Mac, it's either Toon Boom or TVPaint, or else you are basically screwed unless you just want to use an old version of Flash for rough animation and do cleanup and everything else in Photoshop/AE. EDIT: Oh yeah I forgot there is also Digicel Flipbook which is both Windows and Mac, but it's very very buggy, not great for coloring, and maxes out at 800x600 resolution (  ) unless you get the $700 Pro HD version, in which case just get TVPaint.
neonnoodle fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Apr 3, 2013 |
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Apr 3, 2013 00:58
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There is also Pencil. You're always going to be doing cleanup in something like Photoshop, however.
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Apr 3, 2013 05:52
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neonnoodle posted:If you're on Windows, you can use Plastic Animation Paper to do your actual animation, and then do cleanup/color in Photoshop, and compositing in AE or what have you. Thanks! I just tried PAP, pretty much what I was after  .
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Apr 3, 2013 06:23
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tuna posted:There is also Pencil. You're always going to be doing cleanup in something like Photoshop, however. Agh, I was going to ask basically this question. Thought this would be a godsend I'm getting a bug with this that, checking their forums, is consistent with Mountain Lion Mac users and hasn't really been addressed for months. Back to the drawing board I guess. I've been trying to use Photoshop but it's just such a pain, I don't have nearly the control I would like. Flash's interface is also really unintuitive for me. If anyone's got any tips or tutorials for using Flash (or Photoshop I suppose!) for rough animation hit me up. This is kind of disappointing 
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Apr 6, 2013 04:54
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Harry Partridge (Guy who did the Watchmen Saturday Morning Cartoon) just started an animation tutorial series. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHtoFwHh38Q
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Apr 7, 2013 18:35
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redjenova posted:Agh, I was going to ask basically this question. Thought this would be a godsend I'm getting a bug with this that, checking their forums, is consistent with Mountain Lion Mac users and hasn't really been addressed for months. Back to the drawing board I guess. Yeah I specifically did not mention Pencil precisely because it is essentially incomplete abandonware at this point. It's really sad and supposedly there's a fork now but it's just not reliable. For Flash rough animation, I recommend looking at Nick Cross' old tutorials--though he uses Toon Boom now. http://www.nickcrossanimation.com/2010/03/animation-process-with-video.html
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Apr 8, 2013 04:05
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 This is only the second animation I've ever done. I simply sketched in the frames on a sketchpad in pencil, scanned it and arranged, positioned, and timed the frames in Animation Shop 3 & Paint Shop Pro. Maybe I'll do a little more tweening to make it smoother.
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Apr 9, 2013 04:07
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Thanks for the tutorials guys. Super excited about this. I've been working with Photoshop and have managed to come to some kind of manageable solution and actually really enjoying it thus far, so we'll see... I'll post some stuff soon I think. For now this is the first thing I managed to blunder through, took about an hour and a half total. I've never done this before so it was SUPER exciting at the time, haha. WOOO animation time
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Apr 10, 2013 00:31
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Sorry for the double post, I just wanted to ask... does anyone bother with x-sheets these days? I'm doing a decently lengthy traditional animation and it seems great for planning out the timing but I never hear any animators talking about them. I was just curious whether people map out their timing to that degree or if they just kind of wing it as they go along. That's how I've been doing it lately but the planning is pretty nice.
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Apr 14, 2013 17:11
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On the one hand, they were originally created to help coordinate animation among multiple people, including the cameraman. Nowadays if you're working completely by yourself and doing things digitally, they're not strictly necessary. They're still useful for breaking down dialogue shots, and they give you a good idea if you're trying to cram way too much movement into too little time. They are difficult to work with as a beginner because you might not have the intuitive sense of how many frames things take yet. Traditional animators still use them, I know Eric Goldberg talks about using them still.
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Apr 14, 2013 19:47
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Oh cool. And yeah I for one have been totally spitballing as far as timing goes, although it's not too bad to figure out especially if you've done a lot of animating in other stuff. Knowing intuitively how to time things out in After Effects has helped me at least get it sorta generally right on the first run through. I remember coming across them in the Animator's Survival Kit and being like... NOPE. But it does help to have that stuff down on paper.
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Apr 14, 2013 20:45
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Finally, a new cartoon: http://youtu.be/V7rpFvsc_lA These short shorts are a great way to fine tune animation I find. And they're more fun too!
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Apr 30, 2013 03:49
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giangurgolo posted:
Reminds me a bit of John Dilworth. (Courage the Cowardly Dog and other neat things.) Here's his youtube page, which I wish he still updated: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0B5D23CE970C50E3 Edit: job thing removed as I think it goes in another thread. Spacedad fucked around with this message at 07:35 on May 5, 2013 |
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May 4, 2013 19:27
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So straight ahead 3d animation is now called 'layered'? WHAT ARE THESE FREAKS DOING TO MY TERMINOLOGY? It's just straight ahead!! Anyways John K as always has a good bit on it: http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2009/03/straight-ahead-vs-pose-to-pose-disney.html I also recommend doing a little of both as straight ahead can get a bit too crazy/goofy since you're not really thinking of posing but weight control and motion. Better for realistic stuff I guess but even that needs a good pose to work with. Ccs posted:Yeah the weirdest thing about William's work is his obsession with animating on ones, because nobody really does that even in a professional work environment (except with computer animation I guess, where everything is technically on ones). Most things the Japanese do have between 8 and 10 drawings per second. Maybe Disney used to animate on ones, but I'm not sure. Yeah it's really obvious in his work. Ones are usually used for accenting really fast actions and even anime has it and uses it quite often for those 'killer shots'. Check out Ghost in the Shell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK8V9jG7Wjg&t=307s Notice the crazy rear end bulges and poo poo in her back? I feel like anime really pushes the use of frame rate for animation. Things going at low frame rates have a real sense of power behind them as the audience gets to really read the drawings and when it suddenly goes to 2s it suddenly feels crazy and fluid. Disney style usually is mostly on 2s and then 1s every now and then. Not knocking it or anything but generally it's stunted as it only brings things to life(like that's a bad thing, hah) instead of drive power/action through literal timing of the frames.
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May 13, 2013 08:43
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Hey guys, new to this part of the forum. Looking to get some criticism on this animation myself and a friend of mine put together. Hope i came to the right place. It's all pretty DIY first-go type stuff and the lighting can be iffy in a few places but we hope to improve. Thanks for watching. Famous Ghosts Live: Ep. 1
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Jun 7, 2013 03:20
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I'm trying to get out of Flash animation because it is terrible and Adobe is terrible and I hate it it is bad. What are the benefits and weaknesses between ToonBoom Harmony and TV Paint?
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Jun 8, 2013 14:08
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Megaspel posted:I'm trying to get out of Flash animation because it is terrible and Adobe is terrible and I hate it it is bad. TVP is a whole nother animal. It is based on the workflow of traditional hand-drawn animation, so if you learned how to animate on paper, TVP makes a lot of sense. It's a mind-bogglingly powerful piece of software with a ton of features and a steep learning curve. The manual is dense and occasionally confusing because the developers are French and their English isn't perfect. The drawing tools are extremely versatile and customizable. There is a scripting language and a system for making your own toolbars and custom plugins, and a pretty active user base. With TVP you pretty much have a complete animation studio in a box, from storyboard, to animatic, to rough animation, to cleanup, to color and FX. In either TB or TVP you will probably still have to use some kind of third-party compositing software for certain FX or camera moves, or for complex soundtracks. For professional development, I believe Flash and TB are industry-standard in the US. A few studios use TVP (Disney, for instance), but TVP is far more common in Europe, particularly in France.
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Jun 8, 2013 22:41
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I'm not sure if it's still the case but Toon Boom is usually super friendly about letting people try out their software. Like they have special evaluation versions of Toon Boom that don't expire but put a watermark on your video so you're free to learn the software without the financial investment.
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Jun 9, 2013 00:32
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neonnoodle posted:Toon Boom (whether Harmony or the Animate software) is more similar to Flash than TVP is. TB is designed with Flash users in mind, so a lot of the keyboard shortcuts are the same, the look of the timeline is similar, and the software is vector based. There is also support for symbol-like swapping and drawing reuse in Toon Boom, although there is not as deep a symbol hierarchy as you have in Flash. Flash animation at this point has kind of become its own medium with its own quirks and best practices. Toon Boom builds on the traditions which started in Flash, and improves upon them, but it's still a flavor of the same basic system as Flash. If you first learned animation by learning Flash animation, then Toon Boom is probably for you. Also, if you're a 3D native and you understand node-based compositing, there's some of that stuff in TB also. Thank you; this is hugely helpful. I think Toon Boom would probably be easiest for me to learn, coming from a heavy Flash background and familiar with the node system, but I really want to branch out and create entirely different looking work to what I'm used to. I think I'll end up giving TVP a shot. Quest For Glory II posted:I'm not sure if it's still the case but Toon Boom is usually super friendly about letting people try out their software. Like they have special evaluation versions of Toon Boom that don't expire but put a watermark on your video so you're free to learn the software without the financial investment. It is, according to Adam Phillips. Apparently, they are super helpful if you contact them directly, they'll pretty much tailor a package to your project.
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Jun 9, 2013 12:44
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Have any of you heard of Synfig? http://www.synfig.org/cms/ I've watched a few clips and it looks pretty decent? Yeah? It's free, so, that's always a bonus.
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Jun 11, 2013 19:50
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Looking for some feedback on this ~5 second scene I did. This is my first real attempt at animation, and I think it's ok but not great. It could use some polishing up in After Effects (color correction and some lens flare etc) but I'd like to know what ya'll think about the camera motion and composition. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-3dtPtDMDM
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Jun 14, 2013 03:45
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Try rendering with motion blur and give it some more contrast in the lighting.
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Jun 14, 2013 15:08
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Prolonged Priapism posted:Looking for some feedback on this ~5 second scene I did. This is my first real attempt at animation, and I think it's ok but not great. It could use some polishing up in After Effects (color correction and some lens flare etc) but I'd like to know what ya'll think about the camera motion and composition. Ease into pan a bit instead of just scrolling at an even pace, and yeah some motion blur up close would help when it passes us. Also give it a little more time on either side, it feels cut off at the beginning and end right now.
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Jun 15, 2013 16:12
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Thought I share some of my animation. You can see them here. They're all drawn by hand. The fishing cartoon was filmed onto 16mm film, while others are put together digitally. I'm actually trying to make cartoons with cels, only because most of my favorite cartoons were done that way. I'm hoping to shoot it onto Super 16mm film, a format I find fascinating. Normally it's used in indie films and documentaries. In the last few years I befriended a veteran animator named Mark Kausler (who worked on numerous films, including "Roger Rabbit"), who recently did a short film with cels, and it made me want to give it a shot. Nowadays the only cartoon in the world that's done on cels is "Sazae san" in Japan. Not that I never gave digital a shot. I have ToonBoom and do few things with it. This one was done with the software. In the meantime though, I'm doing comic books. Mister Beeg fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Jun 15, 2013 |
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Jun 15, 2013 16:59
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Crosspost from the daily drawings thread. Also, I just completed a short. I can't post a link because it's running the festival circuit, but if you think you might wanna see a cartoon about dudes selling bootleg tapes in a cyberpunk chinatown, PM me and I'll send you a private link!   
Somebody fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Jun 23, 2013 |
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Jun 16, 2013 16:16
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I should probably read all 22 pages of this thread to be sure, but is there anyone here who does traditional animation? I mean, actually draw on paper and stuff?
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Jun 21, 2013 23:24
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Mister Beeg posted:I should probably read all 22 pages of this thread to be sure, but is there anyone here who does traditional animation? I mean, actually draw on paper and stuff? Yes.
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Jun 23, 2013 23:42
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Awesome. I'm glad I'm not alone in that regard. Here's an animation that I've done a while ago. I drew this with grease pencil on overhead transparency sheets rather than paper. I'm hoping to make a film with these characters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UNQgRk-mKo
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Jun 24, 2013 01:16
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Could I get some feedback on this playblast before I give it a final pass? This is intended to go on an animation reel. https://vimeo.com/69034043
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Jun 24, 2013 21:53
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DiHK posted:Could I get some feedback on this playblast before I give it a final pass? This is intended to go on an animation reel. I'm sorry to be harsh, but this is very weak animation. There is a lot of "indicating" -- things which people don't do, and which a good actor would absolutely never do. For example, the double-finger-pointing accent on "you lose" followed by the arms folding, the finger pointing of the other guy. STOP FINGER POINTING. Nobody does that. The poses are just not strong enough and should have been pushed more during blocking. This is one of the reasons that a lot of 3D animators thumbnail using pen and paper -- it's just too difficult otherwise to ensure that your pose will have a strong line of action and encapsulate all the emotional energy you want to bring to the performance.
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Jun 25, 2013 15:59
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DiHK posted:Could I get some feedback on this playblast before I give it a final pass? This is intended to go on an animation reel. The arms are twinning a lot, both on the finger pointing (which looks contrived) and with the guy on the right shaking his arms both in the beginning and near the end. Also the arms on the purple guy are folded unnaturally, it looks like a very stiff and uncomfortable pose. And you've got limbs popping into place and then coming to a complete stop, like when the purple guy points up. Complex character animation with multiple characters and dialogue is an advanced exercise. First you should practice animation basics, to develop a sense of timing and spacing and get a sense of weight. For example that coin the guy flips at the very beginning doesn't have the weight it should, due to improper timing and spacing. The one bit of solid animation is the vibrate on the man's hands near the end. That looks natural, and I like how the hands start out tight and then loosen. Here's a list of animation exercises that will really sharpen you skills. http://www.animatorisland.com/51-great-animation-exercises-to-master/ If you do a few from each level and get crits on them you'll find yourself getting much better. Work your way up to full character animation.
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Jun 26, 2013 03:38
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I was messing around with creating flat looks in Cinema4d, a 3D rendering software program, so I made these gifs. 
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