Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Balls in Motion




My bigass french exam is coming up on thursday, so all I've really been doing is studying..and when I'm not studying french, I'm reading animation books or watching After Effects tutorials...geek. Anyhow, I tried to do a walk cycle a while back which will never see the light of day. However, I did realize I need to backtrack and start at the beginning before I can animate a solid scene I want to show Gobs.

So there are 4 mini animation in the video. The first two I did the whole dope-sheet procedure which was helpful in timing at first, but when I composited all the frames I still needed to adjust the timing and add/remove drawings. They also took oddly long considering I was just drawing circles.

The next two videos however, even though a more difficult task as I'm using perspective, took about a quarter of the time using a totally different approach. I'm sure someone out there does it I just don't know what it's called. Basically I set up my perspective grid and drew more or less all the frames on one sheet of paper like this:

And then I just traced each cell over top, already in order. Didn't have to waste time looking for cells to put inbetweens, and could gauge better how the animation was going to turn out. The timing was a little different as I just had to use common sense, watch a few actual videos of things moving in space and so forth. But I'm much happier with the last two as they don't feel so technical (irony) and the time saving....brilliant. 

1 comment: