Landing Pegasus - DAZ 3D Studio keyframe animation
TJMusic
Posts: 0
I've just finished a test render of my next shot - I thought you may like it :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjfiArxBZtw
This time I didn't use any aniblocks, just pure keyframe animation using the simplest keyframing on DS (I didn't buy Keymate yet). Took a lot of work but it has given a lot of satisfaction to me - I'll stick to working with keyframes now. The animation has been done in DS 4.0 and rendered with Pixie (after exporting to RIB). Used models include Ashlyn for Laura, Grane Winged Foal, Forest and a few other.
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Comments
Just took a look- its pretty nice. I have been thinking about graphmate or keymate and I would guess if you are putting that much effort into simple keyframing then one of those is bound to be helpful. I hope you keep posting!
I'm going to buy at least keymate soon, and both tools in mid-term time range. I may admin DS is not Maya, but it's not a better pencil that makes a better artist, and I can't afford Maya anyway. I also love the content available for DS so it's worth investing in this program, even if it has some limitations. And in this short animation, I've proved myself that even without keymate it's possible to do keyframe animation in DS - even if editing curves and moving keyframes would help a lot.
I will keep posting the progress of my work, but it is a very slow process. Last several weeks I'm working with preparing just the final render of this scene - with more objects in the scenery, higher resolution, volumetric atmosphere and depth of the field. The rendering will take ages in this quality, and in the meantime I'll start animating other shots needed for the whole project.
Very nicely rendered. I guess because it is so short you notice things which would otherwise pass by, but the horse seems to stop a bit abruptly.
Look up animation squash and stretch. In cartoon like animation it is exaggerated to emphasize transfer of mass but it also helps to include some of those concepts in conventional animation.
I agree with all you say :) I sometimes think that now when I'm spending months of work to make these few seconds, I see so many details and mistakes, but when I finish 2 minutes music video, this small shot will be barely noticed. Still, I find it useful to learn more while perfecting a small shot, even if it won't be noticed in the whole project.
The main method I've applied to this shot was using basic 12 principles, and if you scroll it frame by frame, squash and stretch are used here everywhere. But probably the direction of horse squash after landing is too vertical, instead of being diagonal in the direction of its momentun, and I should have exagerated them a bit more. It was difficult to push it more, because to squash the horse landing, I had to do it mostly by bending legs, and a very little of scaling too, but I couldn't literally squash the entire figure like in hand-drawn animation without dedicated morphs that could squash a chest for example. With each shot I make, I learn to apply squash and stretch better, so probably in future I'll be able to do it right. I was focused on showing the horse mass when it's landing, but I didn't risk doing it broad enough. It was also because I had difficulties with editing keyframes before buying keymate :) It's just so much I still have to learn!
I think also the weakness of this shot is that I've planned too much action in issuficient time, so the timing is too extreme and there was too little room for proper anticipation and overlap, making some movements not smooth enough. It had to be timed strictly to the music and without redesigning the whole sequence, I was not able to extend the time for this action. I've already delayed jumping as much as possible and the turning of the girl is already done a bit too fast. So the horse stop had to be done in very short time as well, with 24 frames to show the flight and stretching legs before touching the ground, and 8 frames to show the impact with ground by quickly squashing the legs and overlapping with wings movement. Maybe it's just a timing of this impact that makes it looking so abrupt, but it was meant to show some force to clearly communicate the fact of landing. Also the camera is deliberately set so the hooves are visible to emphasize the illusion of the impact.
All fair comments, and seeing it again I can see what you are saying. Certainly you have good movement horizontaly, it is perhaps the transition between forward movement and stationary where it shows up.
I like the fact you have some movermt in the girls hair as well.
On the whole it is a very good piece of animation. In all 3D renders it is a weird thing as the better something gets the more important the small things become. I assume it is the mind trying to establish if something is real or not. If a render is poor you imediatly know its a render and don't notice the dross. With a good render it is the tiny things that give it away and stand out as a result. Silly realy
That's exactly what I've noticed during work. After keyframing of main movement is done, everything looks stiff and awkward, so details are hard to be seen. After polishing the details, movement of small joints and adding secondary motion, the mind starts to perceive the animation as more real and smaller mistakes become more noticeable. When basic principles like squash and stretch, timing, anticipation and follow up are fairly satisfied, a new factors come to play, like weight and forces. In this animation, I have experienced that illusion of forces depends on the tiny amount of acceleration of moving elements, so a tiny change of a joint angle at certain keyframe can change this acceleration a lot, and the movement looks more or less natural in the result. Achieving the illusion of weight probably requires that all forces are done right, so the thing accelerates and decelerates naturally in all parts of its body. That is a long way to learn how to do it right and it will require a lot of practice for sure!