Speed animation challenge thread? Anyone interested. First topic Walk Cycle or Jumping .
mmoir
Posts: 821
Hey guys,
After seeing SciFiFunk and SteveK's animations over the last while has got me wanting to animate something and they have inspired this thread.. Great animations , you guys will hopefully inspire other Carrara users to get into animation.
As some of you know I tried to get a Carrara Movie project going that didn't real get off the ground and a smaller "Easy Come Easy Go" clip didn't work either. So, I still want to animate something so the idea of a "Speed animation challenge" sounded good to me. I know when digital painting sometimes it is very beneficial to practice paint very quickly, it helps quite a bit and getting better at painting.
I have also heard of speed modeling threads as well so I am thinking this could be a learning tool for us aspiring animators. If anyone here is interested there are no strict rules but here is a list of things to keep in mind.
1. The goal is to get better at animating , so don't worry about the quality of the animation.
2. Just complete the animation "Theme" in a quick manner.
3. You can animate your own model, genesis or whatever model you have at your disposal.
4. A new topic will be posted every week if I remember and people are interested.
5. I repeat...please don't worry too much about the quality of the animation . Just complete the task and I am sure you will learn thiings along the way.
6.Carrara is the preferred animation tool but however you want to get the job done is fine.
7. I will have 2 themes to choose from..... but part of this exercise is coming up with ideas quickly . So if you want' be creative and put your unique stamp on the theme or just do a simple animation of what pops into your mind when hearing the theme.
8. Post a rough time the animation took to do and what tools you used. You don't have to include render times.
If anyone wants to add to these loose guidelines please post away...
Sooo........ The first themes to choose from is either A "walk cycle" or B "Jumping'.
I will do Jumping as I have already done walk cycles before . I will post mine in a bit.
Have fun .
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Comments
It sounds like a good exercise, but I have to admit I am a heavy user of mocaps, which I don't think is what you're after. I have a pretty big collection, a lot from Eclipse Studios but also from other vendors. My "Space Cadet Luther" animation uses mostly mocaps, like the boy spinning around with the toy spaceship which is from PoserMocap, the first one in the video here:
http://www.posermocap.com/2012/04/24/kids-at-play-volume-1-for-kids4/
I'm pretty bad at animating human figures from scratch, too impatient. So I'll pass, but if you guys come up with some good ones, I have space available in my mocap directory ... ;-)
And just to mention it, a thumbnail of a mocap doesn't usually give a very good idea of the whole motion. I use P3DO Explorer from Senosoft which has a great mocap preview function, using stick figures, very fast and handles Poser format mocaps (multi frame pose files) nicely. More here:
http://www.senosoft.com/
I forgot, many thanks. As I've mentioned, Carrara is great for people like me who want to do animations with Poser format elements (and are not modellers). IMHO its much better than Poser, especially for large scenes with lots of lights, etc. Plus its not as expensive or intimidating as, say, Lightwave, which I also own. And the Poser elements are available in large numbers at many sites, and generally very affordable.
Hey Steve,
Yes , I was aiming this at Carrara keyframe animation but Mocap is fine. I do hope others chime in here and participate.
Rendering time is always a pain when animating .. rrrrrrrr........ I have started my Jumping animation.
Hey Guys ,
Here is my video for the "Jump" speed animation. This took me 3.5 hrs to do , so not that speedy.
I used the Genesis figure as my character to animate and made the set with some old models I had made . I dropped in an NLA clip of a walk cycle I created for the walk part and then I created an NLA clip of the Jump in a separate file and then dropped it onto the NLA track.
I did the cheesy voice over and compositing of the video clips in Corel videostudio .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNJUroV8sI4
Hi, Mike!
Glad to see you back !
You had disappeared from our project on Carrarators, if the captain leaves the ship as on Costa Concordia in Italy, there is no more hope…
It seems extremely difficult, even impossible, to create something of Community on the forums.
There are some truths amateurs very interested, but like the majority, they make a more or less long passage on a forum, disappear for a long time, and reappear a day or the other.
We had of good amateurs of animation like RichGelles, Cyborgty, Joe Pingleton, 0oseven, Mike Moir ;-)… but it seems that they are very occupied.
For the moment, we have a really truth impassioned: GARY (name of artist, Steve K) !
I'm sure that there are many others which do not dare to take part.
Like the last time, I'm ready to follow you in this new project, but it would be necessary that a few peoples register under a group of participants.
Good luck and thank you !
Hey Dudu,
I guess I lost hope that the movie was going anywhere so I slowly stopped going there, I got busier also.
With regards to this speed animation challenge .... I think just concentrating on the theme in simple terms is better , I will post another clip just concentrating on the Jump of the character.
Argh! Why do these things always pop up when I have no days off in sight? :ahhh:
I LOVE animating in Carrara! One of my favorite things to do - period! (I mean, exclamation point!) :exclaim:
Dart,
You can do this whenever you want too.
I have uploaded a link showing the process of creating a jump animation inside carrara from start to finish. Well it is not a finished animation as it is very rough but it shows the process I used in my original animation. The video is in a tutorial format and is about 25 min long.
Hope some of you will find this useful. The llink is below.
http://youtu.be/TUYYT3Bya0U
Cool... this isn't a time-sensitive thing... Bravo!
BTW, this is a great idea! And I'd imagine that a person could even do several of these in the same topic. Nice!
For anyone that might be new to this, looking for a few more quick pointers, I've written a short article for the Cafe here:
Carranimation Part 1, Rotation of the Hip
First of all, I love the sweet tutorial on IK termination on the Genesis figure. Very good advice for Speed Animation!
One thing that I've noticed is the reason for the manipulator-grabbing difficulties. This little tool is the incredible time saver/headache elimination tool for Genesis-in-Carrara animators. After removing all of the bone visibility, you then right-click the bone region of the figure, and choose the bone you wish to select and manipulate from the right-click drop-down. (EDIT: You'll likely notice that, by doing this, it will also clean up the right-click drop-down for bone selection) It just makes animating Genesis and Carrara-native figures so much easier and faster to work with.
FENRIC’S CHANGE BONE VISIBILTY PLUGIN article talks more about the plugin, and explains the big difference between using the plugin vs setting each bone by hand without the plugin. Long story short, doing it by hand in Carrara can (and will) cause Carrara to stop working for a time during the process, often several times. And one of those times it may even crash - forcing you to start over... yikes!
Likewise, if it helps, you can change the size of the manipulator handles in Carrara's preferences tab (File > Preferences).
I like the default size, but I use a fairly large monitor. Just thought I'd throw this out there, so that you all know of the possibility... anything to help our fellow animators ;)
Hey, Dart,
Nice articles and tips.
Thanks
Okay,
I did another jump animation , this one is a little better . I did figure a few things out which made animating a little easier which I will share in a future video. Btw Dart, that is a cool animated gif a couple of posts up here which inspired this animated gif which is my first one.:-)
Nicely done, and good idea for the animated .gif !
Another cool tip to know:
In Carrara, you can open a previously saved avi or image sequenced animation and then save it as another format, including GIF!
You cannot, however, open a GIF file, so never make that your first option! ;)
Nice jump, Mike!
I did figure this out while creating this gif but thanks for reinforcing it in my mind:-)
OK, here is my "Jump" animation - I recall you said mocap was OK. I did sort of ignore the "fast" rule", this took a couple of weeks, off and on, trying out some 3D elements I've never used. But that's a good thing for me, some of that stuff I bought and pigeon holed is pretty cool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ez3oyjgMk4I&feature=youtu.be
Cool animation Steve or little movie I should say.
Thanks, and thank you for the incentive. I also got inspiration from a model, as is often the case. Here, it is the medieval tower by Jack Tomalin:
http://www.daz3d.com/divinity-skies-rapture-ii
Thinking about a "jump" and looking at the tower, hmmm ... then remembering a particular mocap, a Da Vinci glider ... %-P