Reworked Animation Reel

[ritchieste]

lol! that guy is funny. i like the comedian scenes.... the best. REmind me of seinfeld somehow.

Thats a sick reel. Good work! How long it take you to do it all?

[SN-AVATAR]

The mime scenes were really good, nice acting and animation, maybe the eyes wasn’t quite right on the first animation but still it was great.

However I think the other animations are hurting the overall impression of the reel, the animations lack smoothing and polishing and seem to consist of pretty few key frames with linear interpolation. Signs of this is also apparent in the mime scenes, but to a much less extent. Signs of joint snapping are apparent as well, especially on the climb over wall scene.

I’m assuming this is of your older work? I think you should take time to revisit them and improve them. In the lifting scene he seems to be bending backwards and have his feet forward at the same time, this would most likely made him tip over, so you should either place one of his feet further back or make him lean more forward, positioning the weight in between his feet. You could also improve lightning quite a bit, either use some sort of skylight or a light dome, this would give nice smooth shadows and much better presentation of your animation.

The walk and run cycle looping wasn’t smooth either (TIP: copy your first key frame and move it to the end of the loop, but don’t add the first frame after the last one, this will make duplicate frames and noticeable hitches in the animation!)
Also in the walk cycle the animation stopped up too much and felt overall stiff, what I mean by that is, if he wasn’t centred at the screen at all times, he would be moving in a step by step fashion instead of a continuous motion, also the hands and feet move very much in sync, it better to have the arms lag behind a bit.
Turning over to the run cycle, it’s just way to fast, at least that is how I felt when I saw it, I had to see it in slow motion to really see what was going on. Just for comparison here is a link to one of my run cycles, Link (http://www.artofjens.com/Videos/WIP/Handsome%20Runcycle%20-%20Low.mov) . I know it’s a tad slow, maybe something just in between would be better?

In contrast the WIP jumping scene seemed a bit slow, I think it easily could be improved by tightening/deleting most of the key frames midair, also the secondary motion on his upper body seems forced, this is because is accelerates then decelerate, when his feet hit the ground, the upper body would immediately inherit the momentum and decelerate. (Or am I of track here?)

And to get a little technical, your audio was really buzzing, I checked it out and saw that it was uncompressed wav (or some freaky compression) with low frequency, you should use a high quality source and compress it with mp3, you seem to have managed to compress to divx quite well so you should be quite capable at compressing the audio too. If you are new to this, Doom9.org is a good resource for compression, this guide might help you with the audio.

Anyway I really liked the mime scenes, you mastered the acting and lip sync quite well on him, it’s just too bad that the other animations lower the total impression of your reel.

I’m sad to say this since you already mention that you have reworked your reel, you just might consider reworking bits of it again.

[Mithrandir315]

Hey ritchieste, thanks for the kind words!! The work on the reel is the culmination of my work for my bachelor's degree. I guess the actual work on the reel took me about six months, but it's tough to say, cause I was working on other things also, and the work you see is only the best out of all my stuff!

[Mithrandir315]

SN-AVATAR, thanks for your critique! I will definetely take into account what you said, and go back and rework stuff! I really appreciate you taking the time to write such detailed comments!

[kerr]

Hum... the music and timings are ok... one thing that bored me is the noise in the audio... that´s a thing that could be easely removed with a good audio editor... some animations are very good, but others are not... i don´t like the white guy with orange hair... his movements are strange... his animation is not fluid... anyway, i think that this is a nice reel!

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.