I'm going to put all my work in the one thread for neatness sake.

So, here's my take on the jump (done sidestep in another thread). He seems abit floaty in the air but it's not too bad.

Looks nice! I've always wondered what it would look like if one of the veterans decided to take on the ABC. I don't think floatiness is the issue, though. Thom seems to accelerate slightly while he's in the air. Could just be the wide-angle lens, though.

I like it Ken. I will probably use it as an example to look at when I do mine. The only thing I can say as far as a critique, is that maybe when the arms are pulled back before the jump, their motion is too similar. In any case, looks great!

Paula

LOL Veteran?!? *Looks behind for someone* I'm only warming up!

Thanks for the comments guys. Good critiques too.

Ken,
His take off doesn't look right. He looks like he's bending down to jump off both legs and then suddenly lifts his right leg. I would suggest either having him jump off both legs or lean him slightly away from the leg he's lifting. If he jumps off both legs, you can still avoid twinning by having the legs come forward at slightly different speeds.
On the landing, he lands on one leg bends slightly and then that leg quits moving. Maybe a moving hold would work better on the right leg as the left leg comes in and his weight is felt.

Looks pretty good otherwise.


Scott

Good start. I agree that if he's going to be taking off from one foot it sometimes helps to rock his weight over the power leg to make more physical since (taking off centered between feet when feet aren't taking off even is a little not possible). The hands are twinning a lot, try offsetting their timing, and also think about breaking the joints more at impact to have a nicer follow through. It may be the angle but it seems like this should be a higher and shorter jump, I see what Mike is talking about (he speeds up in the 2nd half of the jump). At landing he seems slightly off balance because the second foot isn't far forward enough to stop the forward motion of the body.

-Alonso

Good stuff. I think I've made some improvements. The twinning of the arms and then lifting off on one foot was a big illusion breaker. There was no balance in that. Other things changed too....I've moved his hips (weight) over his pushing off foot, but it doesn't look that obvious.

Nice! Much more organic.

A few quibbles:

1. The physics of the jump are impossible. The way his legs move, you'd expect Thom to hop upwards, not go sailing an entire body-length forward. Right now it looks like a magnet is pulling him.

2. I know he's not really karate-chopping himself in the face, but it kinds looks like he is.

3. There's no anticipation on the initial crouch. His torso should lead slightly.

Love the head move at the beginning. I can almost hear the director offscreen, giving instructions...

Hi Ken,

There are many successful elements to your jump test but I'm not quite sold on it yet. I've done some markup on it to isolate some things that you'll want to tweak to really put across the weight and inertia involved in a jump.

-I've tracked his hips in red dots to show the shape of his arc as he jumps. Doing this with a dry erase marker is a good way to diagnose arc and spacing problems.

the letters on the frames:

"a"- I would put the straight leg onthe camera side so we can see it. that straight leg is pretty essential to a good take-off pose

"b"- he's leaning back too soon. If we were to track the position of his head during takeoff we'd find it was actually moving backwards. In real life that would probably lead to a landing on one's back. He really should have his body pointing inthe direction of takeoff to use all the force his legs are giving.

"c" - here he speeds up in mid air. Once he leaves the ground his forward velocity must stay constant until his feet land and are able to provide some braking force. However, I think this is really the right speed for the jump, it's the first half that's too slow. I don't think it's the camera angle, but even if it were, the camera angle is what the audience sees and if it doesn't look right to the camera, then we need to re-animate it until it does.

"d" - his body weight is too far forward of his legs for them to do much braking.

"e" - again, too far forward. I think he would fall from this pose, unless his feet are somehow stuck to the ground.

"f" - during this part of his arc his vertical drop seems to be constant or slowing down. He almost seems to be gliding in to his landing. Gravity should make him constantly fall faster until he lands. Likewise there's a portion of his ascent that seems to have a steady up velocity; gravity would make him constantly slow down.

Ballistic motions like bouncing balls and jumps really have two independent components: the vertical and the horizontal. The vertical is all about the effect of gravity on the mass. The horizontal has nothing to do with gravity. The tendency in CG to keyframe everything at once often makes one interfere with the other, however. Careful channel editing is the way around that.

I would also go back to something more like the arm motion in the first test. Moving the arms in opposition looks like the preparation for a turn of some sort, which is not what he ends up doing.

Hmm, this seems like alot to change but I think it would add quite a bit to your animation.

However, I think the anticipation pose (the crouch ) is working well (although as Luckbay notes, move his weight farther forward), and I can see you're putting some overlapping motion on the head as he recovers. Even more of that would be good.

I should also mention that this whole jumping business is really quite complicated.

In Animation Mentor they have you do a jump with a one-legged ball near the end of the first quarter; no torso, no arms, no head to deal with. And still people had trouble with it.

There are so many details to this, I wouldn't expect any one to nail it on the first try.

So, keep jumping, Ken!

Whoohoo! Got me a teacher! Great illustration and good critiques both. I'll get on it soon.

I made more big changes. It's not perfect, but I'm pretty happy with it now and am going to move onto the next exercise. I learned alot!