Hello,

I'm new to this and I'm forcing myself to go through the tutorials to learn what I need to.. I have bought Animation master to create a specific animation so I'm always itching to go ahead of myself, but that is NOT a good idea since I'm no artist and have only animated using 2D and flash before.

So I thought I'd post my very first attempt at the walking through the door excersise. There are a few things wrong with it, firstly I'd like to say I would like this to last longer than 5 seconds, thats just not enough time to convey what we're doing on this excersize.

After making it I really see the advantages of storyboarding the animation properly beforehand because I didn't leave enough time at the end of the animation to show he successfully walked through the door.

I also notice I forgot to keyframe the door shut before opening it at the end so it starts opening too early.

Is there any way I could at every keyframe make sure that EVERYTHING stays put, because If I move a bone that I haven't moved before it will start that movement from the beginning of the sequence and slowly translate it, is this a bad practice?

anyway attached is my abortion,.... I mean animation.

C

Try and post in a quicktime (.mov), I can't watch .wmv's and I think a lot of people have macs so...

Welcome to forums too!

Just out of curiosity did you find A:M at comic con ?

Ah right, ok I'll see if I can do a conversion, I found A:M some years ago after I saw the classic Killer Bean, but I couldn't afford it and haven't been able to since now we have A:M subscription.

I have been looking to do some 3d animating for years now but hadn't found anything that would do what I wanted how I wanted.

Out of interest what is comic con?

Comicon = large convention of sweaty, be-costumed comic book and fantasy fans in San Diego.


I think your animation hit most of the main points for that exercise.

Maybe the oddest thing is that when he yanks on the knob his hands don't stay on the knob. How to solve that? Well, don't make a pose that causes his hands to leave the knob.

But that's a mostly successful outing. Onward and upward!

Heh, thanks - I was trying to accentuate as much as I could the effort put in so the fact that his hands left the door was deliberate, I put it down to it being a cartoon universe with different laws of physics!

5 seconds is not a lot of time, so I tried to make the most of it

Robert's right about moving on.

The purpose of that exercise is to make sure you understand how the keys, constraints and timing work which by the look of your animation and what you said in your post, you do. Unless you plan to use the exercise in a demo reel, you hit all the main points and you should move on to the next exercise.

To answer your question about making sure everything stays put....

You don't really want to set keys on every frame. The most popular method used is "pose to pose".

Set all the keys for the bones that you will be working on in the first frame. Then use force keyframe with the "key model" option clicked on for all your main poses. Make sure you are only keying the bones you plan to use.Think of what the poses are for the main action and create a single block of keys that locks in the pose.

Like in the "take a walk" exercise, you only key the main poses of the walk but you do them in blocks.

Later you can add in betweens and offset the keys to polish your animations.

I hope that helps,
George

Ya know... in A:M you could easily make that door knob stretch. That would be a fun little extra to figure out.

Thanks for your advice guys , I'm really enjoying working through this, I'm finding it easier than I thought I would and learning lots about A:M.

I am just rendering the plane one which I shall post when I've done