ABC 5, jumpin Options

[amarillospider]

Models
Ik Joe w/ setup machine rig
Ik Joe w/ my rig (sorry no fingers)
by Steve George (AKA Tunames)
Basicman zip
basicgal zip

So last week we tackled side steps, and that was enough. I guess I didn't take into account how much humanoids add to the challenge level, sorry. So we'll go a little slower.

Excercise A: Balance. Take you simple model of choice from a nuetral standing pose, have them raise 1 leg up, move to some other position, and set it back down. (Think ballet, or martial artist who likes to pose ) Use your arms if it helps you to balance (this is just to give people another chance to focus on Center of gravity balancing over the support leg, and hip tilt's (especially versus the chest)

Excercise B: Make your chosen model, jump big.


Again think of contrasting concave versus convex lines of the body. Also focus on anticipating and follow through. Our hero Keith Lango uses a jump as an example in his lines of force tutorial. (If you haven't figured it out yet, Keith Lango is an animation God, go read everything you can on his site!!)

-Alonso

[Tunames]

No comments yet? everyone must be really busy working on this exercise trying to be the first one to post.......

[Heath_Naylor]

Well, I am new so don't make fun of me . Ignore the left arm, had trouble with it (it jumped around during the tweening prosses)... Anyways here it is. B is good I think.

ABC5a Avi (138 DivX)
ABC5b Avi (112 DivX)

right click and click save as otherwise angelfire tells you it doesn't allow direct linking.

[PixelDust]

OK, here's my first try at the "standing on one leg" exercise.

One_leg_A1.mov (approx. 80 kb)

BTW, Heath, I tried to save your animation, but when I tried to play it, I got an error message about it being corrupt or that I had the wrong codec. I'm using Firefox and Windows Media Player 9. What codec did you use?

[higginsdj]

Cindy,

Wow - almost perfect You have done a great job animating the character.

The one main flaw is character balance. The balance you have at frame 25 is what you should achieve just as you lift his/her foot off the ground.

To get really picky, when the right knee turns out - it stops dead - no sign of any movement. You need a moving hold to keep the lower half of the character alive.

Cheers

[higginsdj]

Hi Heath,

Ideally you want to compress the aniamtion to something to the order of 200kb or less. Use QT, Sorenson 3, Low and render to 320x240 settings in AM. This way you will get more people viewing your work. It gets quite expensive for us slow modem users to download 1+mb files all the time.

Cheers

[Tunames]

Wow great job Cindy! I don't feel qualified to comment..yet! but if I had one critique it would be the Right foot it's to steady like he's standing on something...

here's my FIRST pass just for timing and all got some serious popping with the arms but it's all the time I have right now will do a 2nd pass when I get back in town .........

ExerciseA 1st Pass

[higginsdj]

Steve,

Aside from the arm popping its a pretty good job.

Things to fix:
1. His left foot goes down before it goes up. Don't anticiapte the foot raise by putting the foot through the ground anticipate by shift the body balance and maybe turning the knee a little in preparation.

Things to look at (not necessarily fix):

1. Torso looks stiff. Did you use any rotation?
2. It looks liek the left leg is returned to the ground in a linear matter and there is a pop in the knee. Don't drift it back, place it back.

The rest is great - the balance - the little jiggle in the raised leg (Cindy - this is what you need in yours)

Cheers

[PixelDust]

Steve, did you happen to move the bicep bones at all? I found that when I did that, it made the arms pop some. I fixed it by removing any keyframes on the biceps and just move the hand targets and the shoulder bones.

Maybe you should look at the arms from the top view and check the angle of the elbows to see if they flip.

The legs look good. I'll work on adding some jitter to the legs on my animation.

[PixelDust]

[higginsdj]

Here's my attempt at Exercise 5A. Note that I have no real idea how a side kick is supposed to work/look so mine is simply and exercise in motion and balance!

Exercise 5A (45kb MOV)

Cheers

[jfirestine]

Getting jiggy with it!

Here is my first attempt with Exercise 5A.

Exercise 5A first pass


David: I like the movements you gave him. My only suggestion would be to "Hyper" extend the keyframe of the kick... to give it some punch and help convey a powerful action. Its just my personal preference, however it looks great the way it is!
Nice work!

Steve: When he lifts the left leg, I would expect his body to sink down due to the additional weight on his right leg. Something is making it look like strings are attached to his arms and pulling them up. Do you animate the arms IK? I personally animate arms using Forward Kinematics, this gives the animation natural arcs. But just my opinion. Keep up the good work! Looking good!

[amarillospider]

A couple of thoughts first:

Now the balance movement is one where we will naturally twin, but twinning is such a no no thing in animation that you will often get knee jerk critiques "your twinning" so be aware, there are times when we do twin in life, but twinning looks a little boring so make sure you need it, don't get stuck to long in it, and try to be creative about getting into it and out of it.

A common thing I'm seeing is that the Center Of Gravity (COG) isn't getting pushed over far enough. If you are balancing on 1 foot, that foot is your support. If you imagine a line straight up from the support you'll need equal weight on either side of the line. So if the body is simmetrical, but the leg comes out of the side (look at a skeleton), then with only 1 foot down the pelvis will have to be symmetrical over that foot. In other words the leg will not be straight up and down, but fairly angled.

Heath:
I'm having problems downloading yours, I'm having to let it open in a browser window (after copying the link and pasting into the address bar) and then save the page.
A:Pretty good. The recovery is nice and the arms going up for balance is good. The Center of Gravity isn't quite over far enough, right now most of your weight is on the screen left side of the imaginary line. The body looks a little like you set 2 key frames and then set a new frame inbetween them, it would spice it up more to vary the tilt of the ribs and pelvis. The arms start twinning when he starts falling and landing. After landing the right foot slides back along the ground, pin it down. Great start so far.
B:Really solid start!! The main complaints are that it's a little floaty (like he's underwater) and it's pure twins. Timing in animation is like any other art, it has to be varied to be intersting, some fast parts some slow parts. Give him a little more time in the squished up antic, explode him into the leap, slow the leap down at the top(actually just leave it at it's current speed), speed it back up as it comes down (just like a bouncing ball) Hit the impact quick (try like 4 frames long) Leave him recovering a little longer before he moves. Mix it up with the arms and legs, 1 goes before the other, 1 goes at a somewhat different angle than the other, etc. Great start!

Cindy:
Looking really nice. Good use of hips and nice moving of the arms. His cog needs to be over the support before he can left the other leg, otherwise he will fall (right now his leg moves before his weight is ready). You did a very nice job of avoiding twinning while balancing the arms (except at the end where the straighten and then drop). The hips and torso are working very nicely together in the beginning but the hips stop moving while the torso keeps going and it looks less convincing. Could use more successive breaking of the joints in the arms, especially at the wrists. (Successive breaking of the joints is instead of unfolding all the joints at once which looks a little floaty, you unroll the joints, ie. start with the shoulder coming down all the way, then the elbow opens, then the wrist unfolds, then the fingers splay out.) When he puts his leg down I realize that his COG hasn't been over his support leg. This is a great start!

Steve:
Good movement of the ribs vs pelvis. And great work with the head. You can bend the elbows down a little more sometimes and they won't look quite so twinned (which they aren't really). Gotta get your CoG more over the line. The foot is slipping through the ground before it comes up because of spline interpolation in your chanels, change it to linear and it will go away.(make sense?)

David:
Excellent!! Well done. Great job making the whole body explosive at the kick. It even looks like maybe you put some shoulder animation in there, sign of a real animator. Only suggestion I would make is break the wrists some, right now the wrists stay constantly straight along the forearm, use them to add more follow through. (you can do the same with the fingers versus hands also if you want to go that far). Special assignment for you: animate an attack. put 2 guys in a scene and have 1 land a punch or kick on the other (don't go to overboard on this, keep it a short excercise) (it might help to look at this page and the next from the Dojo Project tutorials, and you might also read Keith Lango's tutorial on adding snap to animation)

Looking good so far everyone

-Alonso

[amarillospider]

Jospeh:
Very nice. Great job with the hips vs ribs and the head, really looks like he's trying to keep his balance by rotating his core around (which is how we really do it). Good job being brave and tilting the torso so much to the side. The only real advice I can give you is that you'll need to shift the COG more over the support foot when things are more vertical (when he's more horizontal with ribs tilted and leg out the COG is fine where its at) so you'll have to shift back and forth. Can't comment on the arms yet 'cuz they look still pretty ruff, but I do notice that you are keeping the wrists stiff like David, don't forget to bend them to add follow through. Lookin good

-Alonso

[GregHunts]

First time for everything. First post. First animation. I've had AM for 4+ years and this is the first time I've actually done something more than fiddle with it and then walk away.

I had a hard time with the arms on BasicMan3. As I moved the target Nulls the elbows jumped all over the place, hence the odd arm jitter at the beginning. Hopefully over time my animating will get better.

Excercise 5A