Squirrel

[Per-Anders]

Well, it's a good start for a first time, however may I suggest that you perhaps want to try something a bit simpler for your first character modeling and animation. Maybe even work at one then the other.

Your tracking isn't terrible at all, but the compositing itself needs some serious work. Right now the squirrel appears to be glowing on the background plate, to fix that you need to work both on the lighting and shading of your character and of the grading into the final footage, if the character is in an area where there's a lot of shadow then make sure that when you render it the character is at those points also having shadow cast upon it, also try to match the lighting of the scene itself in general a bit better, the direction of the light, how diffuse/sharp it is.

With regards the animation, I do think you should perhaps start with a simple animation so you can focus purely on improving your CA skills, however with this you should check out some footage of real life squirels to see how they move, how they turn around, right now you have it more or less just hoping along with little body movement, like someone is grabbing it and physically shifting it behind the scenes, a squirell reaches out with it's front paws first in a smooth arc as it leaps forward blancing and taking the weight on it's front at first till the rear catches up. They also don't tend to just flip directions, the body has to turn around which requires a whole little dance and motion of it's own. Really get some footage and try to work on this, once you have mastered working on character animatino for much simpler characters of course, a quadroped is quite ambitious as a first character and unfortunately this shows, start out with making simpler objects animate and have "character" and build up slowly to bipeds and finally to quadropeds after that, you have to get the basics down first.

Keep working at it, it's good to stretch yourself now and then and I'm sure you learned a lot in the process of doing this that will help you in future animations.

[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.