Animation Critique

RKirtlink

Here's a first pass on my latest animation for my demo reel. I want to give it a lot more polish and get it to a point I'm happy with so I'm hoping to get as much feedback as possible. Also it's pretty frame heavy at this point and it's kind of hard to adjust the timing and whatnot. Anyone have any tips on working with frame heavy or frame by frame animations?



Here's a syncsketch too but it seems to be stuttering a bit for me
https://www.syncsketch.com/playground/81f27e9e69334ac39c3c1c24af9e7429#169970

penOr

Everyone has a different workflow but if your first pass is so frame heavy that adjusting the timing is a struggle then I think a different workflow would be the best solution (in future!). As for salvaging, you could bake it all out, re-time whatever sections by mass scaling keys then re-bake so they're on 1's. From there you can either manually remove keys you don't need as you work or you can simplify keys and see how it looks.

Hito

Make a new override layer in Maya; add all your controllers to that layer. Set the override layer weight to 0. Scrub through the animation, it should look exactly the same as if there's no override layer. With all the controllers selected and Override layer highlighted (you should see a green light on the layer where new keys will be set), set a key for the poses you want to keep on the override layer. Do a pass for just the major key poses; then another pass for enough breakdowns to block out the actions. Once you have done this for the entire animation, set override layer weight back to 1. Your character should move more or less like the base layer, but less polished looking.

You can lock the base layer and continue animating on the override layer just like normal; or clear all the keys on the base layer, and merge the override layer back down, using Smart bake in the merge layers option. Otherwise you'll bake a key onto every frame.

RKirtlink

Baking definitely seems like the way to go, I'll have to be a little more careful with how many frames I use during blockouts and early passes :P Thanks guys!

Definitely going to be using override layers more often from now on haha. I barely even had to clean anything up after baking.

AnthonyAnimation

Cool concept! My main suggestion is to keep in mind where the force is coming from. If the baby is pulling his arm make sure that is what is leading the action with the rest of his body following. 

tiagosol

I like the idea! very fun to animate!
I think would be interesting to go into blocking stage instead of spline just to have strong notion of the movemenet and how forces are reacting on the body when he is going side by side.
Try to study from The Animators Survival book the overlapping part. Is very interesting to see how the body reacts in chain after the force is apply in certain place.  You can check some examples in youtube, watching animal tails, arm waiving Hello, slow motion punch in the face videos.

RKirtlink

Still want to take the time to push it further, but I updated the vimeo link in my first post to where I'm at now. I think it's starting to to get a lot better but I'm going to keep polishing. Thanks for the feedback everyone

_adamturnbull

Cool idea. Like the others said, try not to go too frame heavy until you have the timing down. Even just using two cubes to block out the timing would be enough for something like this.

For the animation I think the impacts need to feel a little heavier so you really feel him hitting the floor. Try having him stretched out on the frame before the impact and then super squashed flat on the impact pose.

Also having his body arc over the baby between each hit would be great for this, so his whole body moves in an arcing motion having some of his body trail behind (his legs for example) as most of the body lifts off the ground at the same time right now.

I'll leave some better notes on sync sketch when I have more time. Looking forward to seeing how this progresses!