Swing Those Hips
Another week of joy and twitterpating at Animation Mentor. And our task this week? Clean up our Vanilla Walk and make it smooth and natural. One may think that, since this is animation in a computer, you just hit the "Smooth" button and everything works great, right? HA! Hahahahahaha! Oh, that's a good one!
The answer is a resounding HELL NO. Refining a walk is HARD. And I mean really freakin' HARD. And judging by interviews with working animators that we saw, it may well be the absolute most difficult thing in animation. Period. It took a couple days to refine my walk so that the legs and feet an hips were moving in a natural fashion, and then a couple more days just to fix the knees. That's right, kids. DAYS just on knees. You see, the legs in a CG character want to bend in a way that's easy for a computer to calculate, which, unfortunately, is NOT the way real knees work. So, no automatic motion curves will work. About half of the knee movement I had to animate by hand, frame-by-frame. What results is this:
And even this still has problems that I need to fix. Namely, too much stretchiness in the legs. Plus whatever else my mentor finds incorrect. I also wound up almost completely changing the forward motion of the legs a mere six hours before the assignment was due, thanks to the help of a fellow student pointing out a glaring error in the movement.
As well, I also made my (hopefully) Final Final revisions to the Tailor animation, this time adding some more overlapping action to the tail.
We also had another Stu pose this week - depicting "Concern." And it is certainly not easy to depict the emotion Concern in a character with no face. Here's my planning sketches (the circled one is the pose I picked to replicate in the computer. And as always, click for a larger view.):
#4 came straight out of bad childhood memories. And here's the resulting pose with our good friend Stu:
Yup, that's what I often wake up to. And judging by family history, I have a good 6-8 more years (at least) of that to look forward to.
The RED is capable of capturing digital video images at greater than 4k resolution (4520×2540 pixels, which is greater than the highest-resolution scans of 35mm film available.) It uses a digital sensor that has a light sensitivity and latitude range that equals or surpasses 35mm film, can record any frame rate from 1-100 frames per second, can be mounted with nearly any 35mm and 16mm lenses that currently exist, records these images to a revolutionary lossless video codec, records directly to hard drives or compact flash cards, yields a quality of image, straight out of the box, that many DP's have declared equals or exceeds the quality of film, and all this in a camera that costs less than a new car.
Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) shot a 12-minute WWI short film on prototype versions of the camera back in March, which looks absolutely incredible, and Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Ocean's Eleven) is currently shooting his two Che Guevera films (starring Benicio Del Toro) back-to-back exclusively on RED cameras.
But hey, the proof is in the pudding. To view the coming onslaught of footage from these cameras, look no further than RED's official online forums at http://www.reduser.net/
The REDolution is here, my friends. And it's a beautiful time to be making movies. Incidentally, anybody have $17,500 I can borrow? ;-)
The answer is a resounding HELL NO. Refining a walk is HARD. And I mean really freakin' HARD. And judging by interviews with working animators that we saw, it may well be the absolute most difficult thing in animation. Period. It took a couple days to refine my walk so that the legs and feet an hips were moving in a natural fashion, and then a couple more days just to fix the knees. That's right, kids. DAYS just on knees. You see, the legs in a CG character want to bend in a way that's easy for a computer to calculate, which, unfortunately, is NOT the way real knees work. So, no automatic motion curves will work. About half of the knee movement I had to animate by hand, frame-by-frame. What results is this:
And even this still has problems that I need to fix. Namely, too much stretchiness in the legs. Plus whatever else my mentor finds incorrect. I also wound up almost completely changing the forward motion of the legs a mere six hours before the assignment was due, thanks to the help of a fellow student pointing out a glaring error in the movement.
As well, I also made my (hopefully) Final Final revisions to the Tailor animation, this time adding some more overlapping action to the tail.
We also had another Stu pose this week - depicting "Concern." And it is certainly not easy to depict the emotion Concern in a character with no face. Here's my planning sketches (the circled one is the pose I picked to replicate in the computer. And as always, click for a larger view.):
#4 came straight out of bad childhood memories. And here's the resulting pose with our good friend Stu:
Yup, that's what I often wake up to. And judging by family history, I have a good 6-8 more years (at least) of that to look forward to.RED Letter Day
In a non-animation-related bit of news, Friday marked a huge step forward in the realm of digital cinema. The first 25 RED One cameras were released to the public Friday. If you're not familiar with RED - this is a camera that will change everything, and its release marks the very death-knell of 35mm film.The RED is capable of capturing digital video images at greater than 4k resolution (4520×2540 pixels, which is greater than the highest-resolution scans of 35mm film available.) It uses a digital sensor that has a light sensitivity and latitude range that equals or surpasses 35mm film, can record any frame rate from 1-100 frames per second, can be mounted with nearly any 35mm and 16mm lenses that currently exist, records these images to a revolutionary lossless video codec, records directly to hard drives or compact flash cards, yields a quality of image, straight out of the box, that many DP's have declared equals or exceeds the quality of film, and all this in a camera that costs less than a new car.
Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) shot a 12-minute WWI short film on prototype versions of the camera back in March, which looks absolutely incredible, and Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Ocean's Eleven) is currently shooting his two Che Guevera films (starring Benicio Del Toro) back-to-back exclusively on RED cameras.
But hey, the proof is in the pudding. To view the coming onslaught of footage from these cameras, look no further than RED's official online forums at http://www.reduser.net/
The REDolution is here, my friends. And it's a beautiful time to be making movies. Incidentally, anybody have $17,500 I can borrow? ;-)
posted by Rich at
2:08 PM
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