Difficult animation.

deohboeh

I hear rigging bird's wings are the toughest things to do and some say that they are always looking for a bird's wing rig in rigging portfolios. Is there anything like that in animation in your understanding?

It's ok if it's something you personally feel has been tough to animate for you personally and haven't heard many people complain about it.

unit187

Animating combat with acrobatics is always challenging, I'd say. It is quite hard to show correct physics in characters' movements, especially if they jump and fly around in impossible manner, but you still need to sell it in believable ways.

Add punches and sword hits. You got to have good sense of timing in order to make them look effective, yet not too fast and not too slow. In attacks you literally play with 1 or 2 frames, yeh, that precise. Add 1 frame and your sword attack looks too fast, remove 1 frame and it looks slow and boring.

That is for gamedev animation. Cartoons and movies is another beast...

deohboeh

unit187 wrote: »

In attacks you literally play with 1 or 2 frames, yeh, that precise. Add 1 frame and your sword attack looks too fast, remove 1 frame and it looks slow and boring.

Whoa!! How many frames in general is an attack? Shouldn't adding a frame make it slower and removing a frame faster? (I am absolutely new to animation if you haven't noticed... )

slipsius

ya, you`re right, deoh. Unit got them backwards.

Combat can be tricky. A lot of the time you`re animating to a designers specifications. Personally, I had animating tails and rope. The theory is simple enough for them. But making them look realistic can be tricky.

aesir

I've always heard animating a cat or a horse can both be really fucking hard. There was a story about a pixar animator that got hired entirely based on a single realistic animation they did of a cat.

I think interaction between multiple characters is really tough because it's a whole other set of limbs that you have to worry about at the same time.