Demo Reel

[Royal]

Really enjoyed looking at your demoreel, my guess is that your experise is in modeling and rendering since the animation leaves for a bit to wish....But in those other areas it looks spectacular.
Keep up the good work

[nphailliff]

I agree with Royal. You have some great modeling, texturing, and lighting, but the character animation needs some work.

It seems like you definitely have the technical skill, so I would mainly suggest looking into the more fundamental aspects of animation that don't even apply to CG per se.

I hope some of these suggestions help:

1) Your animation seems to lack weight. You should feel the mass of the character projected through its lower body particularly, and then into the ground, to give it a believable presence. The way your characters currently move through the environment, they are almost suspended above the surface without the pull of gravity. The body of the character needs to rise and then fall with each footstep to convey this.

You sort of do this with the ant walk cycle, but the legs need to compress into the ground to show that the mass of the body is also weighing down on them as well. Also, even then the ant body motion is going to be more complicated. I don't have ant footage on me of course, but my intuitive guess would be that different rigid segments of the body would be twisting up and down subtly as the legs alternate from planted to extended positions, instead of the whole thing bobbing straight up and down uniformly.

2) You need to smooth out the motion between different poses, a lot of your transitions are jerky and mechanical. Thinking of secondary motion and follow through would help also. All of this can be fixed with a few extra keyframes or simply adjusting the tweening between your existing ones.

3) Get some variety in your animation. It's nice to start out with a looped walk cycle to save yourself some work, but go back and push and pull some keys and modify a few poses so it's not so mechanically repetitive. Your ant walk cycle is an exact loop with the legs and the mouth in perfect sync and it kills the reality of an otherwise nice model.


I would take out the ant walk cycle from your demo unless you want to go back and fix it. It is mainly an animation showcase and, well, what an employer doesn't see won't hurt you :)

Your demo should show your strengths and avoid your weaknesses. I think employers feel it is important that you are able to see both for yourself.

Anyway, I hope this helps. You definitely have some really great stuff, which is why I felt I should spend the time to point out the aspects you might look into improving!

[Alkos]

thanks for you comments !

I'm 100% agree with you. the animation is not good.
I have spend lot of time to learn skinning, setup etc... (I love setup :)
but I never try to do a real character animation before my demo reel except some very shorts walk cycles or shorts movement in order to test my setup.
In fact, I prefer spend my time to work on lighting/shading and texture. I think if I find a job it won't be as animator :))

nphailliff you 'are right to say :
"Your demo should show your strengths and avoid your weaknesses"
but my goal was to show that I "know" how work animation. I think it is important to understand the work of other people when you work in a team. But I don't want to be an animator. I think it's a very specific job.
Maybe you are right, I might take out the ant walk cycle and fix it, I have not the time. I must move out in other city.
I wanna do this in some weeks.

thanks again to spend time to comment.

[Larry_g1s]

Very nice. Very entertaining. The kewi looked photorealistic, as well as the antz with the caterpiller at the end. Great work.

:bounce:

[piajartist]

The catepillar is an esquisite model, but the individual legs seem to be unatural moving, perhaps more emphasis on each leg gripping the tree and the appropiate flowing pattern.

[stephen2002]

quite impressive modeling and rendering. Some of the animation was good, you defenetly do good rigging setups.

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