Dopesheet rough-in.

Tweaked the dope sheet, added eye and facial movements, hand and arm movements, and tried to play with some expressions.

Damn... good! She's very floaty right now... she's making me dizzy!

Em...is the floaty part good? Just for fun I tried to render this scene in Final with no multipass. At 8 minutes into the render with not even the first frame finished, I aborted. This scene has a lot of hair and is going to take hours to render. I can't even imagine what the whole movie is going to take.

Besides that, what should I try to make this scene better. Thanks for the feedback.

Damn....doesn't the dope sheet use the Ooo pose? It looks like it's just using one pose for everything actually. All my work in making those poses and they're not used!

Animation wise it's good. I agree with the floaty comment. That is her chest bone drifts from one pose to another rather than moving quickly....stopping.....moving quickly. And you definitely need to get the hip bone involved.

I haven't had much experience with dope sheets and can't seem to get it just right. Can a combination of the dope sheet and phonemes be used? Ooo pose???? Are you making a joke? I'm tired and don't get it? What do you mean?

I must really be dense, but I'm assuming floaty is good? Drifting from pose to pose is good, right? Hip bone will be involved next iteration.

One frame just finished cooking - 16 minutes with all hair and grass showing.

"That is her chest bone drifts from one pose to another " =floaty
"rather than moving quickly....stopping.....moving quickly" =not floaty (good)

Hmm, I actually wanted the effect to be that way thinking it might suit the fairy-like Ozma.

So now I have a definitive - floaty - not good! OK, back to the drawing board.

In this take I added keyframes to reduce the floating effect - I don't want to eliminate it altogether though. Let me know if this is better and what I can do to improve it. Is it ok for her to look into the camera or should she look a bit off to the side? Is the arm gesture ok? Feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks

One reason the motion in general looks odd is because the whole upper body is pivoting around while the hips remain motionless.

The hips and upper body try to balance each other out. If you lean forward, your hips go back. If you lean to the right, your hips shift left. Sometimes this motion is small but it is almost always there.

Another thing that will look unnatural is when several body parts move as if in a locked unit. For example from about 01:00 to 02:04 the head, torso and arms all pretty much start, move and stop in unison together.

I'm off to work right now, but I will take your words to heart. When I come home today, I will try to put them to good use. I'll post the result later today - please check back and comment.

Thanks

Eric

I started from scratch. I know it's rough, but give me your feedback please.

Here's my quick thoughts...

3_05_54_commentsMP4.mov

Looks a bit robotic

Robcat:

I really appreciate the time you took to respond and the way you broke it down. This is extremely helpful and encouraging. For some reason I simply had a block on what to do with this shot and how to do it. It's too late for me to work on this tonight, but I'll post the results of your mini tutorial tomorrow.

Cheers

Eric

Something else just occurred to me... of that wand were in her other hand that would make a better silhouette than if it were in the hand that seems to always be wandering in front of her body. That's a substantial change, i know, but i thouht i'd throw that out there.

Here are some of the changes you suggested. I tried to incorporate anticipation by adding a slight downward arch to her head and hand movements, changed her left hand position and changed a few key frames. For now I want to keep the wand in her right hand.

It's better, but...

That does look better!

-her head hits a sudden stop at the end. I'd slow-in to that.

-since that wand is drawing attention to her hand, I'd get a more natural pose onthe hand:

3_05_54_handcommentsMP4.mov

Head movement at the end a little extended, hands tweaked but not real satisfied with it.

Yes, her hand movements need to look more deliberate... right now they are drifting into the next pose, how about causing them to stay in one postion a little bit then move into next pose and hold there a little. Her other movements are better now, but also drift rather than maintain their poses.

I'll try that, thanks Rich.

on posing the fingers...

3_05_54hands2_MP4.mov


here's the prj

ozmahand.prj

Rob, what you pointed out, the default hand/finger position, is exactly what I'm having trouble with. In your video, I could not tell how you translated and scaled all the fingers at once to eliminate the gap between the fingers. Let me go through the rest of the video and see if I can figure it out. Have I told you how much I appreciate all your help???? I do!!!

Back to the video.

Here's the bad news. It didn't happen all at once, each bone was posed individually. The actual discovery process of getting from 0 to "finished" hand was about two hours. I just keyframed each stage as I went along so I could repeat it quickly and not make a two hour video.

As I'm following your video, I'm tweaking the hand and am getting pretty good results. The odd finger length and positions are part of the problem, but it's looking much better. Stay tuned for the next run.

Edit: I feel like I'm whitteling away at a block of stone with a screwdriver. Here is the latest.

That hand grip on the wand is starting to look good. Maybe the thumb should be more flat against the wand like in Robert's video. In a scene I did a couple weeks ago - 3_05_31 - I left her gripping the wand the other way, which doesn't look as good, to match other scenes. I wonder if I should go back and change that one to match this?

Actually changing the hand grip by changing the individual fingers isn't that difficult once you get the hand, I mean the hang of it

I'm ready to call this done, unless someone has more tweaks in mind.

You might want to clean up those arcs a little and the lead in and lead out of the arms, body movement. You know like the head has really nice arcing going on, but the arms are a little too much - stop--go---stop--go... they seem to need a little anticipation, like before you turn your head it turns a little in the the opposite direction before it does the turn. You know what I mean? Like swinging on a rope... you need to gain momentum by first swinging in the opossite direction.

Argh, I was afraid somebody was going to mention that!

LOL