Four Legged Run Cycle….

I was looking for some flash run cycle tutorials when I came across this one:

http://active.tutsplus.com/tutorials/animation/animate-a-continuous-quad-run-cycle-with-flash/

Finding this now is convenient. We are working on run cycles in 2d and talking about four legged animals in character design.

I think the art style is interesting and it caught my eye. Its simple but you can still tell it is some sort of large cat. Maybe, I will try something like that in one of my animation. It is interesting how your mind still understands the movement, even with all the negative space.  Reading through it, it seems like an easy tutorial. I like the fact that it has a lot of reference images, so I can create my own key frames. There is some action script in this tutorial which seems like it could be helpful when I have to do my traveling loops. When I get some free time I want to do this tutorial.

Peur(s) du noir…

I was going through my files and backing them up when I came across my animaitc for my film. I watched it and stared thinking about what kind of style that I wanted to do it in. I knew that I wanted to do it in black and white. I also know that I wanted to do it more like a silent film, but with music and sound effects. I always loved the old black and white look of the old universal monster movies of the 20’s and 30’s. This reminded me of the movie that I bought a while back Peur(s) du noir or Fear(s) of the dark. This is a collection of animated shorts that are very stylized. Some of the animation are 2d while others are done in 3d . All the shorts have a dark tone and are very in line with the type of stories that I want to tell. The short that I like the most was the one with the man with the dogs. There isn’t much to the story but I just really like the line quality, it’s messy but still some how crisp. The lines almost seem to have a life of their own, and if I do my movie in 2d this is something that I may want to emulate.

I couldn’t find any real clips so I will just post the trailer…

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buoG3gLa6Ik

Running

While doing some research for my upcoming run cycle I came across this clip:




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYD6xG7UzrI



I still haven’t seen toy story 3 but I really want to. Pixar does some of my favorite animation. Looking at this clip I got a good look at what it takes to create a realistic run cycle. While doing my walk cycle last semester I had some troubles with my walk cycle because, some of the frames looked so similar to one another. It was difficult to make the movement look smooth. No matter what I did I always had some sort of hiccup. As of right now it looks like a run cycle may be somewhat easier. It seems like since the character is moving faster that there will be a bigger difference in the key poses, so this should make drawing the inbetweens a little easier. Also from this clip I see how important it is to shift the hips of the character. The shifting of the characters weight from left to right is what really sells the effect. It also looks like the head movements will be very important.

Week 1: Flow

This week’s animation topic is flow. I never really thought about how important flow is to creating a realistic animation. Flow is something that we take for granted in the real world. I just got home from the first class of the semester and had some time to kill before my next class, so I figured I would fight a few rounds in Super Street Fighter 4. while playing I found an interesting example of flow:




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg18mUyy9KE



There is a character in the game named Ibuki, she has extremely long hair and looking at its flow it is pretty impressive.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_emzqUi17Q



This is Ibuki in an older game in 2d sprite form. Her hair still flows, but it is not as interesting as is in the 3d game.



Video game graphics have come a long way, and they unlike animation for film, have to react to what the player is doing. This makes the animation all that more impressive.