Animating- Dog animation Part 4

This is just a quick update on the progress that I have made so far. At the moment, I do see some benefits of the new workflow which I have decided to do for this project where I started with the main body, squash and stretch and then posing out the legs. I found some pros and cons to this.

Some of the benefits that I have found animating this way is that, I feel a sense of progression of my work and that I feel more confident with working with the graph editor, whereas normally it's quite confusing when working the graph editor after the blocking out my animation.

However I can see the cons in this, as sometimes I do feel like I'm animating in straight ahead, and I feel like I'm not getting anywhere. 

The two videos that are rendered out are in it's early stages and I can see a number of faults already. I have mainly focused on the body and quickly moved the legs into their key poses to get an idea of what it may look like in the future. 

One thing which has bugged me was that it felt as though the trot cycle was very slow. I think to be honest, that I have one too many poses in this and that I have to get rid of one. This problem had occurred when I was doing the run cycle with my character and that my mentor had pointed this out for me. 

I believe that the pose which I can get rid of, is the image below. The reason being is that it takes too long for the Nico leg to touch the ground. 

One too many poses

As this cycle is at it's early stage, I wanted to try and exaggerate some of the rig but, sometimes it doesn't always work out. The image below highlights the rotation of the Nico, where I think I should tone it down.

Rotation needs to be toned down

Even though I' trying to make this move as realistic as possible, I still think that there needs to be that touch of emphasis on the movements. I therefore think that the front and back needs to be clearly contrasted, to make it look more appealing. 

Contrast- feels robotic

I'm really pleased with the progress so far, even though it means going back and re-animating some poses again. 

Keep animating- try something new.

Trotting cycle and trying something new- Dog animation Part 3

Hello all once again. It's back to business and back to the dog animation. Although I had done a cheetah walk cycle from the previous month, I feel that it had lacked the necessary details and realism of a quadruped animation, and with all the research I had now done from Professor S. Sumida power point I feel that I have missed out an important task to getting it done right.

Trotting cycle- Key poses

Trotting Cycle- Key Poses

I have then replayed the reference video which is part of the storyboard that I have done and focused a certain cycle that the dog performs, in this case, "trotting". So, I would then animate this first and then go back and continue with the story. I feel that this would refresh and hopefully change the way that I will animate this time around.

Technical Difficulties

I then however ran into another problem with one of the rigs, where I wasn't able to save the file. This meant I had to find another Dog rig for the animation. I was going to give up when I found a video tutorial that had mentioned how the rig "Nico" was a very good one to use. So below, is the new rig that I will be using. It'll be kind of cool as I would then try to make this animal have a dog-like personality.

Nico Rig

The video that suggested this was a person that I'm currently following. He has some terrific videos and tutorials. The one thing that I like about some tutorials is that I get to see the methodology and hopefully find a tip that could help me animate that more efficiently. One of the things that I saw which I have tried doing and proved successful, was how he worked on the body first and emulated the bouncing ball effect. By doing this, you will have made sure that the creature or character will have that bounce life like effect (12 Principles of animation).

 
Basic Quadruped Walk Cycle Tutorial from Chris Sokalofsky on Vimeo.

I just want to mention that I'm not copying from this tutorial. This was mainly to educate myself to how another person workflow works. Plus, the person is going through a walk cycle rather than a trot, which I am trying to achieve. Read my previous post to learn more about the difference...or : A trot is when two feet are off the ground at the same time- unlike a walk -_-

As much as I hate to try a different approach to my workflow I thought, "when else is a better time to experiment and learn from your mistakes?". So as well as animating the body first, I'm also going to try and animate without blocking out my animation in stepped mode. Instead, I will still do pose to pose but, will do this in splines. This is another topic which was mentioned from Animator mentor, and already, it feels like refreshing approach. Like my friend once said, "everyone has a different workflow but will also reach the same conclusion".

I'm going to try and aim to complete most of the trotting cycle by the end of the week, though no garuntee as I might have to pop into work, lets hope not.

Keep animating, try something new.

Happy new year and projects completed

Happy new year! I hope you all had a wonderful time celebrating the new year. This will be the last few days of my break before I start to pick up where I left off, from the animation which I have had planned. Again, I apologise for the lack of work as I had more shifts at work and that the holidays were around. Got to enjoy life right?

I have however, have something to show to you guys which I'm quite pleased to have completed. I technically started on January 9th 2013 for this project but, I was able to recover other previous recorded content that I had done earlier of 2013. Anyway, the video below is based on my life where I have recorded each day for one second for one year. Each day had a meaning to me and are moments which were important.

One Second each day for a year 2013 from Andy Mo on Vimeo.

As I watch the video, I have the sense of feeling of when times were good and I was full of optimism of my future but, then there is a point where I lose myself and start to lose heart of where I want to go in my career.  However, as I look at this as a whole picture, I realise what I must do in order to get where I want in this new year of 2014.


This video project would not have been possible were it not for "Cesar K."here is a link of his talk about his one second project idea. Thanks for his inspiring talk.

http://www.ted.com/talks/cesar_kuriyama_one_second_every_day.html