Student looking for feedback

Avcat

Hi, I've just started my second year in a game art degree, hoping to specialize in animation. I'll be posting my animation course work here regularly and would greatly appreciate any feedback given to help me improve. 

Avcat

So my first task this year was advanced walking. I had to have 2 characters passing each other, showing emotion in the way they walk. One then had to change their emotion as they pass the other. Here's a quick playblast of what I've done.
https://youtu.be/Y0N2iYOS_vA

Avcat

I've reworked the second walk for the male character because I wasn't happy with how it looked. Hopefully it conveys his emotion a bit better now and is much smoother.
https://youtu.be/rYbBtWzVoE0

Avcat

My second animation exercise was to have a character jump across several poles, concentrating on posing and overlapping. Here is what I have so far.
https://youtu.be/PIi-R03GIC4

slipsius

Are you rotating the hips at all in your walks? They don't seem to follow the legs much. If the right foot is forward, the right hip should be forward and down. same with the torso. 

The womans posing in the first shot is rough. Real rough. Arcing her back like that just looks bad and unnatural.  

Did you shoot reference for any of this stuff? If not, you definitely should. It will help you immensely. I can see potential with these, but your posing needs a lot of work. More natural poses. More keys for inbetweens. 

The guy jumping across the poles. On the second pole, he rotates on his heel. Should definitely be rotating on the toe/ball

Avcat

slipsius said:

Are you rotating the hips at all in your walks? They don't seem to follow the legs much. If the right foot is forward, the right hip should be forward and down. same with the torso. 

The womans posing in the first shot is rough. Real rough. Arcing her back like that just looks bad and unnatural.  

Did you shoot reference for any of this stuff? If not, you definitely should. It will help you immensely. I can see potential with these, but your posing needs a lot of work. More natural poses. More keys for inbetweens. 

The guy jumping across the poles. On the second pole, he rotates on his heel. Should definitely be rotating on the toe/ball

Thanks for the tips. 
These were exercises we did in class so I didn't have any references to go off. I'll definitely shoot some for future animations. I've gone back and tweaked the posing and now you pointed it out it was very obviously wrong so hopefully its a little better now. I did have some rotation in the hips and shoulders but I've made it more pronounced so it flows better. 
I've also fixed the rotation on the pole. Hopefully this looks better

https://youtu.be/4f_j9vvzNWo
https://youtu.be/HQ_Q1Kulxfs

Avcat

Here is another couple of animations I've done for the project. We had to do an animal run and trot. These both took about 4 hours to do each. Crit welcome!!
https://youtu.be/_ZsfAXextUg http://https//www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQixTT05Lf8&feature=youtu.be

Forever

Hey. So, I just took a couple of looks at both your animations. Something about the tiger walk felt a bit wrong so I went and looked at some reference (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAOdejkF8UY). 

So there's a couple of things I think you can do to push your walk to the next level. 

- If you take a look at the legs on the tiger, they're outta sync. They back foot is almost all the way forward before the front leg even begins to move, while on your animation, they move together, giving the tiger more of a prance feel then a walk. I also noticed you were going for a trot, but I think you do need to give the back leg more time before the front goes forward. This should also add some awesome overlap to your walk cycle . 

- The other thing I found interesting looking at the reference - that I absolutely have never noticed before - if you take a look at the front paw, they seem to twist as they come to the front and almost knock the other leg. You probably don't need to do it to the same extent as above as your walk seems a bit faster than even the reference at full speed, but I would add a little bit of a turn to the front foot, just to break it up a little bit. 

On your run, there is a big thing that I want to point out. One of your back legs doesn't come far enough forward. If you take a look at the first 15 seconds of this clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ldz2eB2zSvY) you will notice that the back legs land and come back up together. Yours don't come up side by side, one is too far back then it should be if you wanted to really capture the tiger running. 

I hope I helped! Keep improving! You're doing really well!

Avcat

Forever said:

Hey. So, I just took a couple of looks at both your animations. Something about the tiger walk felt a bit wrong so I went and looked at some reference (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAOdejkF8UY). 

So there's a couple of things I think you can do to push your walk to the next level. 

- If you take a look at the legs on the tiger, they're outta sync. They back foot is almost all the way forward before the front leg even begins to move, while on your animation, they move together, giving the tiger more of a prance feel then a walk. I also noticed you were going for a trot, but I think you do need to give the back leg more time before the front goes forward. This should also add some awesome overlap to your walk cycle . 

- The other thing I found interesting looking at the reference - that I absolutely have never noticed before - if you take a look at the front paw, they seem to twist as they come to the front and almost knock the other leg. You probably don't need to do it to the same extent as above as your walk seems a bit faster than even the reference at full speed, but I would add a little bit of a turn to the front foot, just to break it up a little bit. 

On your run, there is a big thing that I want to point out. One of your back legs doesn't come far enough forward. If you take a look at the first 15 seconds of this clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ldz2eB2zSvY) you will notice that the back legs land and come back up together. Yours don't come up side by side, one is too far back then it should be if you wanted to really capture the tiger running. 

I hope I helped! Keep improving! You're doing really well!

Thanks! That's really great advice. I'll definitely have a look into it.