New website and animations

[Volker]

Well Simon, I'd like to start saying that your Jayne Night film was very ambitious. I hope I don't come off too harsh, this is meant to be a helpful, and constructive critique. With that being said,

1) Your walk cycles are a little awkward. All you characters walk with their feet too far apart.
2) Your feet don't show enough roll. It looks like the characters have flat pads for feet, not feet with ankle and ball joints.
3) There is no side to side movement in any of the walk cycles that I saw. Hips go from side to side when weight is transfered.
4) After Jayne strangles the guard, the sneek/walk that see does right before see peeks behind the wall is pretty awkward. She just doesn't seem to have any sense of weight. She also looks very stiff.
5) The shot of her shoes after coming up the stairs is also very stiff and suffers from the flat foot syndrome. Also an example of when her feet are too far apart.
6) On the lighter side, the shot of her walking across the pipe is pretty darn good!
7) On the darker side, the kicks that she pulls on the standing guard convey no weight. If you look at her body, it is completly motionless, even though she is throwing two powerful kicks.

I think the main issue concerning your animation, is weight and fluidity. Most of the movements are too stiff, and don't convey enough weight.

In regard to your monster anims, the run cycle isn't too bad. It shows a good amount of weight, but is suffers from the same thing the walk cycle suffers from, lack of overlapping action. The arms are like robotic limbs. They should be loose and fluid, overlapping the movement of his chest and hips. It looks like you only have two keys for the arms, front position and back position. Same with the head.

Lipsync:
Probably the main issue with your dialoge is the targets. They are too general and don't hit the core shapes. Instead of watching him hit different targets, it looks like his mouth just doesn't stop moving. He also never blinks. Blinks are very important for realistic movement.

One good idea that I've always been told: turn off all the cool eye candy stuff like lighting, texures, ect. and look at your animation bare naked. If it looks good there, then you can add all the other stuff, but don't expect the other stuff to hide poor animation. And I'm not saying that you're doing this, I just know that it's very common to do.

Unfortunatly you've put yourself at a huge disadvantage, because you're trying to replicate human movement. We all know what that looks like, and when it doesn't look right, it sticks out like a sore thumb. My advise: try working on more exagerated movements to gain a better sense of weight and fluidity, and later on move to more subtle human actions.

I hope this wasn't too harsh. I just want to point out some areas that could be worked on. Let me know if you have any questions.

~Zach

[dewboy]

Thanks for the response Babyhopper.

You're comments are fair and I have to agree with most of them! :)

Hopefully I can find the time to improve those points. When I did finish the animation (Jayne Night) I was able to look back on it myself after a couple months of work and see problems in the first lot of scenes were! If I were to redo it now it would be ten times better!

I'll try and fix the monster cycles, You are right about the two keyframes though :)
I plan on doing more of these animation exercises becuase I started the Jayne Night project without knowing how to properly deal with run, walk etc.. cycles.

Thanks

Simon

[JoeRedstall]

Hey Simon,

like your site (mine's a work in progress at the mo) looks like you've had a busy year :) Have you had any luck with getting into the games industry yet ?

Joe

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