@Drone2222 - That walkcycle really suits the character. Good job!
@Ravenslayer - Thanks. Your characters in the Disney thread are wickedly awesome. It would be fun if we entertained the idea of doing some sort of a collaboration down the road
@KyleBernard - First time animating a dog running?- not bad :-) If you're open to criticism.. adding some overlapping action to his jaw/tongue would do wonders in bringing him to life. As well as exaggerating the movement of his rear hips & tail (depending on if the rig allows it or not)
Hope everyone got to enjoy some much needed downtime over the holidays!
Deviantart?I thought deviantart doesn't allow hotlinking.Can u tell me how u posted it here?
Also guys,I am starting a 2d full body fight animation and I wanted to ask if anyone knows how one can create a looped tunnel animation in flash such that it is continous.
I was thinking of doing ithe whole project in 3d but rigging/facial rigging is a pain and won't have time to fix rig problems if they come up.
great thread, just finished reading all 9 pages. I'll def. jump in and pose my animations, I'm very interested in this 20 mins challenges, so improove my speed and workflow.
Would like to thank Gav for posting his models for free, I'll try to rig one of them for my own tests, using auto rig tools. If use Maya, there's a script in creativecrash called abautorig, it does a great job.
Stephen, your animation tests are awesome. Keep it up.
Hugh >> I get the impression from your animations that you animate a part of the character at a time, is that how you work? For example, you work some on the pelvis, then the foot, and finally try to piece things together? The reason why I get this impression from your animations is because the limbs and torso of your character seems to do their own thing, very little unity in their motions, as if they don't belong to each other.
I suggest that you try animating pose-to-pose. Which is for each keyframe you pose the whole character before moving on to the next frame, do NOT bother about graphs until you're almost completely done. The majority of your animation should be based on poses like traditional animators does with the drawn medium. They don't have the luxury of interpolating tools doing half the work for them like we do, 3d animators usually fall into the trap of trying to let the character rigs and computer interpolation do most of the work. I once fell into this trap myself where I spent more time on trying to get the graphs to cooperate rather than just put that work into great poses.
If you want to do a great exercise, try to do an animation without interpolation. It is perfectly fine that the animation is choppy/low framerate. The goal of the exercise is to try to make a believable animation, with weight and all the animation principles in there, with keyframes alone. Start by setting your default keyframe type to stepped in your 3d application and continue from there.
I agree with MrOneTwo. We're not aiming to be mean Hugh. You really need to go all the way down to the basics and get those right before experimenting with unusual and interesting movements. I too had a lot of problems understanding your latest animation, my guess is he's summoning a block?
Try do a more common animation. Maybe make a character pick something up from the ground or follow Brazz' advice of doing the bouncing ball exercise. It's very important to get a good grasp of the basics, not only will it make your animations look better but you will work faster too.
Teaching myself how to light&render properly, while playing around with a new rig.
it was fun practicing with the kitchen broom- I felt like a NINJA!
Thank god no one was around to see that tho ;-)
@Hugh - so what have you discovered. Which way do you enjoy animating more?
Never animated anything serious in 3dsmax, I have this thing about it when it comes to animation: horrible rigs, slow rigs, etc I do need to practice on it though, do you sugest any rigs? ( no Biped please hehe)
I found Bboy pretty easy and cool to animate, due to his shape that already gives him a bit of personnality. For advanced animations, I am stuck with the same problem. There are no cool rigs, better to make one and give it to the community
Been meaning to post in this thread for awhile, here is a quick walk and run cycle i did last week. Blocked them out in about 30minutes, then spent an hour or two (didn't really time myself so probably more xD) fiddling and tweaking
Ohhh... This dinosaur looks familiar! Where did you get this or were you working for someone?
@brazz yea i should probs add that to the cycles, didn't notice how stiff they looked =/ For max rigs, since i animate in max, there are not to many good ones, and most ones on website like http://rigsarena.blogspot.co.uk/ are made with biped/CAT =/ I use max rig i downloaded from 11secondclub. Its pretty cool, not perfect though. It best to just make your own if you have the time
@darthwilson thanks man, yea this was for some contract work for a game (first contract work actually )
@stephenVyas i have loads of dino anims, but they are all from last year so they are slightly old, but i should have some more dinos done soon to put up Btw, love the Po animation and the lighting is sweet, i always enjoy the working out an animation
@AndrewHelenek With that spawn animation i dont think the goblin should move back after landing, it goes against his momentum. Also, some anticipation before the blades disappear for his landing would be nice.
Spent alittle bit too much time blocking out a new animation, hope you guys like it so far, still in stepping mode and there are some issues with some of the poses i need to sort out before smoothing it out and having some graph editor fun
Cool man, I used to work for that studio.. I was rigging/skinning and doing many other things but I think that particular rig was by someone else. I remember skinning that dino though!!
@ Slozhny awesome cycles, the Alien freaks me out because of fact it has no eyes O_o. at 0.15 his feet slow right down though was this just to make the transition to the next cycle but easier?
Also the Alien because his head seems so huge I could really see that guy using telekinetic powers to levitate or something, a levitating idle would be immense!
Ok, so I broke the twenty minute rule, but that's only because I lost track of time. This rig is so much fun to play with. It's not finished but this is what I had after I glanced at the clock. I believe it was about 2 hours. Its only an hour and 40 minutes over. Its not that much :P
For anyone who's interested, I've rigged up the Captain Beefheart model graciously provided by Gav. It's rigged in Maya, .mb format.
There's nothing fancy like sliders for the fingers, or IK/FK switching - because, well, I don't know how to do those at the moment.
So there's no shortcuts in animating it, but at least it's serviceable!
Hope you guys like it, and thanks again for the awesome model Gav!
Be sure to take a look at the notes as well.
Thanks for sharing! I did a little walk animation with him, cool character.
was more than 20min (more like 3 hours >.<) but I couldn't stop once I started :P still want to animate the bird and other little things.
@ sketch404- Dat belly fat. Very nice. I would like to see the bird animated as well.
@ AndrewHelenek- I like the secondary motions on the little twigs. It's a nice touch.
I'm glad i'm not the only one who breaks the 20 mins rule. XD
This time I managed to stay under 20 mins. This is a first pass at a spider walk cycle. I was messing around with some skeleton/rigging presets in cat motion rigs and discovered a spider version. Its not as hard as I thought it was going to be.
I found this thread the other day and I wanted to participate. The idea of messing around with a load of rigs as I saw the OP doing really appealed to me. So I set about finding some rigs. I found alot more than enough to get started with. But I kept running in to a wall. Why in god's name do people use a format other than FBX? And at worse, why do so many people use .max files?
I'm a maya user and getting some ripped game rigs (lara croft, arms from fps games) has been an utter nightmare. What do these riggers have against maya?
It's really frustrating me how i'm seeing all these rigs that really get me excited to animate and then discovering that I can't use them unless I go about learning a whole new program.
If only there was one universal format so no one would be left out. Oh wait, we have that, it's called .fbx, start freaking using it.
I've been there, I have pretty much downloaded every maya rig out there. :P
It's a little frustrating finding a rig on the internet and suddenly thinking up an idea, and not being able to do it. For example I found some arm rigs. I even downloaded and installed 3ds max to try and export them myself.
It turns in to this.
I have learned in my time that I can't cope with doing anything to complicated with computers, as soon as I hit a wall (like the one here) I just end up questioning why, why would the model suddenly change like that, why wouldn't it export certain controls, why? why? before you know it, my head is aching and I'm wrapped up in the corner of my room shaking.
I have found tonnes of arm rigs, all of which are in .max formats.
Been a Max user Myself arm rigs easy to find but to be honest I think anyone here could model an arm and some hands even if there crappy low poly they can still be animated =D
I know that. To be honest, if I knew finding an arm rig would take this long I wouldn't have wasted the time and I just would have made the rig myself. But all the max rigs I have found look more interesting then alot of the maya rigs. I'm simply expressing frustration I'm not saying these problems can't be over come, that there aren't other ways, or that I will die with out a decent arm rig.
mxdirector: I have a really old set of rigs for UT3/UDK for Maya here. The set includes both the character, first person rig and an example weapon. It is pretty old and simple though ( 2008 ), I hope it's enough for your needs.
Replies
First time animating a dog running, second time trying a dog ever!
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/5047514/dog/dog_canter001.mov
@Ravenslayer - Thanks. Your characters in the Disney thread are wickedly awesome. It would be fun if we entertained the idea of doing some sort of a collaboration down the road
@KyleBernard - First time animating a dog running?- not bad :-) If you're open to criticism.. adding some overlapping action to his jaw/tongue would do wonders in bringing him to life. As well as exaggerating the movement of his rear hips & tail (depending on if the rig allows it or not)
Hope everyone got to enjoy some much needed downtime over the holidays!
Thanks! Here is my second go!
(quickly done blocking pass)
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/5047514/dog/dog_run001.mov
(Polish)
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/5047514/dog/dog_run003.mov
This rig is not very flexible unfortunately, I shall be modifying it or switching to a better one!
lets see if this works!
Speed animation thread is the best on polycount! Each of these took about 20 minutes to complete. I should have more to post soon.
Deviantart?I thought deviantart doesn't allow hotlinking.Can u tell me how u posted it here?
Also guys,I am starting a 2d full body fight animation and I wanted to ask if anyone knows how one can create a looped tunnel animation in flash such that it is continous.
I was thinking of doing ithe whole project in 3d but rigging/facial rigging is a pain and won't have time to fix rig problems if they come up.
[ame="
Would like to thank Gav for posting his models for free, I'll try to rig one of them for my own tests, using auto rig tools. If use Maya, there's a script in creativecrash called abautorig, it does a great job.
Stephen, your animation tests are awesome. Keep it up.
I suggest that you try animating pose-to-pose. Which is for each keyframe you pose the whole character before moving on to the next frame, do NOT bother about graphs until you're almost completely done. The majority of your animation should be based on poses like traditional animators does with the drawn medium. They don't have the luxury of interpolating tools doing half the work for them like we do, 3d animators usually fall into the trap of trying to let the character rigs and computer interpolation do most of the work. I once fell into this trap myself where I spent more time on trying to get the graphs to cooperate rather than just put that work into great poses.
If you want to do a great exercise, try to do an animation without interpolation. It is perfectly fine that the animation is choppy/low framerate. The goal of the exercise is to try to make a believable animation, with weight and all the animation principles in there, with keyframes alone. Start by setting your default keyframe type to stepped in your 3d application and continue from there.
Edit*
Also what brazz said.
Try do a more common animation. Maybe make a character pick something up from the ground or follow Brazz' advice of doing the bouncing ball exercise. It's very important to get a good grasp of the basics, not only will it make your animations look better but you will work faster too.
it was fun practicing with the kitchen broom- I felt like a NINJA!
Thank god no one was around to see that tho ;-)
@Hugh - so what have you discovered. Which way do you enjoy animating more?
Ohhh... This dinosaur looks familiar! Where did you get this or were you working for someone?
more!
@brazz yea i should probs add that to the cycles, didn't notice how stiff they looked =/ For max rigs, since i animate in max, there are not to many good ones, and most ones on website like http://rigsarena.blogspot.co.uk/ are made with biped/CAT =/ I use max rig i downloaded from 11secondclub. Its pretty cool, not perfect though. It best to just make your own if you have the time
@darthwilson thanks man, yea this was for some contract work for a game (first contract work actually
@stephenVyas i have loads of dino anims, but they are all from last year so they are slightly old, but i should have some more dinos done soon to put up
@AndrewHelenek With that spawn animation i dont think the goblin should move back after landing, it goes against his momentum. Also, some anticipation before the blades disappear for his landing would be nice.
Spent alittle bit too much time blocking out a new animation, hope you guys like it so far, still in stepping mode and there are some issues with some of the poses i need to sort out before smoothing it out and having some graph editor fun
Cool man, I used to work for that studio.. I was rigging/skinning and doing many other things but I think that particular rig was by someone else. I remember skinning that dino though!!
[vv]25511310[/vv]
haha small world, yea i found out about the rigged version after i had re-rigged and animated it lol =/
@slozhny awesome cycles man
http://imgur.com/h2A5JAW
Ok, so I broke the twenty minute rule, but that's only because I lost track of time. This rig is so much fun to play with. It's not finished but this is what I had after I glanced at the clock. I believe it was about 2 hours. Its only an hour and 40 minutes over. Its not that much :P
Thanks for sharing! I did a little walk animation with him, cool character.
was more than 20min (more like 3 hours >.<) but I couldn't stop once I started :P still want to animate the bird and other little things.
This thread is awesome!
@ AndrewHelenek- I like the secondary motions on the little twigs. It's a nice touch.
I'm glad i'm not the only one who breaks the 20 mins rule. XD
This time I managed to stay under 20 mins. This is a first pass at a spider walk cycle. I was messing around with some skeleton/rigging presets in cat motion rigs and discovered a spider version. Its not as hard as I thought it was going to be.
[ame="
I also used this reference for the animation. It was very useful.[ame="
I'm a maya user and getting some ripped game rigs (lara croft, arms from fps games) has been an utter nightmare. What do these riggers have against maya?
It's really frustrating me how i'm seeing all these rigs that really get me excited to animate and then discovering that I can't use them unless I go about learning a whole new program.
If only there was one universal format so no one would be left out. Oh wait, we have that, it's called .fbx, start freaking using it.
It's a little frustrating finding a rig on the internet and suddenly thinking up an idea, and not being able to do it. For example I found some arm rigs. I even downloaded and installed 3ds max to try and export them myself.
It turns in to this.
I have learned in my time that I can't cope with doing anything to complicated with computers, as soon as I hit a wall (like the one here) I just end up questioning why, why would the model suddenly change like that, why wouldn't it export certain controls, why? why? before you know it, my head is aching and I'm wrapped up in the corner of my room shaking.
I have found tonnes of arm rigs, all of which are in .max formats.