Hey everyone,
I decided to make a topic where I could get feedback on whatever project I'm working on instead of making a new topic for each one. I'm interested in all things blender, but I'm mostly focused on animation. I hope this is a good way to get more eyes on my work and improve as an animator. I definitely don't expect to be posting nearly as often as a lot of other polybooks out there, but hopefully this will be a good way to keep me a little more accountable to finish projects. I plan to post my finished projects on the gallery as a kind of "showcase".
Thanks for commenting!
Hi and welcome! You're certainly in the right place for feedback. I'm not particularly strong on animation, but there are at least a couple floating around to help. Looking forward to what you can make!
Here is the current project I'm working on. I finished the first three of the @waylow courses and thought it would be fun to participate in the eleven second club (a character animation contest), but I wasn't sure I was ready for some full blown character animation. This was an exercise I made up to practice my timing, spacing, and overlapping action. I modified the Dougie rig by Wayne so that I could make him nosedive into the ground. This took me a long time, but I figured out a passable solution in the end. The idea I had was to make Dougie interact with a switch that makes confetti go off (kind of random, huh?). Here is my blocking without the tail:
And here he is with the tail blocking:
Hope it makes sense, all critiques are welcome.
Good stuff Sam.
Just keep refining the animation as you move from blocking into spline. You might find that some of the moves are a little slow (you'll find those moments), but that is why you block things out, makes it really easy to edit before you put in all the detail.
But I love that you are actually putting what you've learnt into practice. Go, Sam, go!!!!
silentheart00 Thanks! I'm interested in critiques from animators and non-animators alike, so no worries there.
@waylow Thanks for the input! I'm losing steam a bit on this project, but I've continued to pick away at it little by little. I finally got the animation to a basic splining stage. I think I'll do a little more work on the timing and movements in general (especially on the tail) in a second splining pass before moving on to polish. Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Sambear
Hey ssambear good stuff man.
If you find yourself losing steam, then break it into smaller tasks.
For example, "Today I'm only going to work on the body from the start to frame X" and then your next session "Today I'm only going to work on the body from X to the end". Then do the same thing with the tail.
Break it into as many chunks as make sense to you. And try to work on the chunk that needs the most work first.
As more the animation, here's just a couple more thoughts.
-The tail is way too slow in some spots. It's hard because the tail switches from being fully active to fully passive. The easiest way to think about this is, if it feels like it's reacting like it's under water - it's needs to be active (get it to where you want it faster.)
But when he is moving fast, it will mostly be fully passive and follow where it came from on the last frame.
(hope that makes sense)
With the part where he gets startled - you could try 'staggering' the spacing like how a cartoon cat gets startled.
It will pop up and then jitter, before coming down and running off super fast.
But it's going really good so far Sambear. Keep going!
Nice. You are ready for polishing.
The tail can still be faster in the parts where he does a 180 turn. It's so much better, but still just a little snappier will make it even better.
Great stuff. This is looking good.
@waylow Thank you so much for helping me complete this project! I thought I would post the final here even though I also posted it in a gallery project. I gave everything a final polish and added sound (it's a bit cringy, but I think its better than nothing). Any critiques for this version are welcome, but I will probably move on to another project to apply them unless there are any gaping holes in it.
Also, I have a few questions for you as I think about starting a new animation project. I would like to at least start on this month's Eleven Second Club contest even if I can't finish it in time for the deadline. Do you know off the top of your head any free character rigs that work in Blender? I have tried the eleven rig (no duh), and Mike, but I was wondering if you knew of any others. I also tried to get my hands on the Norman rig, but all the download links I tried were broken or didn't work.
Thanks again, Sambear
Nice work ssambear. I hope you are proud of this.
Sadly there are not many good rigs for acting at all. (I'm slowly working on that but I can't seem to find enough time to finish what I've started)
There are the rigs from the Blender Foundation (Vincent), but he is rigged with BlendRig so it's the so much more complicated than it needs to be. My advice would be to just use the simplest rig possible.
Sorry I can't help you more in that department.
Thank you Wayne and Miranda for the rig suggestions. I've been working on making some changes to the Eleven rig over the past weeks and I'm planning on using it in this month's ESC contest. This month's audio is super tough to figure out a scenario that makes sense. I scribbled up a little animatic of sorts to experiment with the acting choices. Could you guys give my some advice on how to make this scenario make a little more sense?
here is my first animatic:
and here is another one with an alternate ending:
If you couldn't understand my scribbles, the main synopsis is that a crook (Voice 2)'s underling (Voice 1) is actually working for the police. The crook wonders why his underling is serving him food, but soon finds that it is a trap. The problem is that the guy says he's going to "arrest [him] later, again", which doesn't make much sense. Here is the transcript of what they are saying:
Voice 1: Why would I do that?
Voice 2: It's what I was wondering, why would you do that?
Voice 1: Like a party, or dinner or something?
Voice 2: I don't know, I thought you were... planned the evening.
Voice 1: No I meant to like arrest you, I'll arrest you later again.
Voice 2: Take it easy Jim.
Any comments or critiques are welcome!
Thanks,
Sambear