Warrior Animation Project
polycounter lvl 4
Hey guys! Wanted to post an animation project I've been working on for at least 3 years on and off. I do game animations all day so this has been more of an experimental learning project.
The characters are 3D and composited to achieve a 2D look. Backgrounds are 2D. I'm not very good at modeling so the cartoon rendering helps hide that a little.
I originally had a story and started doing concepts for it all, but I didn't really have enough time (or talent) to execute it well. So I boiled it down to a fight scene so I could concentrate on the parts I was really interested in - the look and the animation.
Watching Last Airbender\Korra really got me interested in animating at 12fps and I learned a lot framing through those shows. I've been experimenting with smear frames and whether I should do that in 3D or paint them in Photoshop. Here's a very WIP gif showing that.
And finally, here is a video showing off some of the more finished but still WIP scenes.
That's it for now. Any crits or anything are very welcome.
-Lou
The characters are 3D and composited to achieve a 2D look. Backgrounds are 2D. I'm not very good at modeling so the cartoon rendering helps hide that a little.
I originally had a story and started doing concepts for it all, but I didn't really have enough time (or talent) to execute it well. So I boiled it down to a fight scene so I could concentrate on the parts I was really interested in - the look and the animation.
Watching Last Airbender\Korra really got me interested in animating at 12fps and I learned a lot framing through those shows. I've been experimenting with smear frames and whether I should do that in 3D or paint them in Photoshop. Here's a very WIP gif showing that.
And finally, here is a video showing off some of the more finished but still WIP scenes.
That's it for now. Any crits or anything are very welcome.
-Lou
Replies
How did you do the composition? Just render out the 3d in maya/max and do everything else in After Effects? I'd love to hear a bit more about your process/challenges with going in 12fps.
All I'd add really is that I'd make the guy move more vertically during his run, a bit of up and down motion might help sell the speed of the run.
@heboltz3 Yeah for the compositing it's just rendering out a few passes, diffuse, shadow, rim lighting, etc. Then layering them in After Effects.
Animating at 12fps is fun but also a big challenge. Every frame is hand keyed with almost no interpolation. The trickiest part is bringing the animation into After Effects. The composition runs at 24fps and the animation runs at 12fps. A lot of the movement (translation across the screen) has to happen at 24 or else it looks choppy. Usually, I'm animating characters in place in Max then doing all the translation in After Effects. There's a lot to it and I'm planning to do a process write up when the project is done.
@Forty I have Max set to 12fps. I would use stepped keys, but biped doesn't support that as far as I'm aware. It's not a huge deal anyway since I'm usually keying the whole body every frame anyway. The biggest annoyance is that when I play the animation in Max, it plays inbetween frames so I have to playblast it constantly.