Animation: House Fly

[mimo8]

cool anim!

no majour crits
everything works fluently - the only question is if the habits should seem real/human or more cartoonish

if you´d like it more cartoonstyle i´d exagerate the movements a bit more

[gL_spear]

I think the animation on the fly is excellent can't crit anything there.

Its the ball I have some crits over when he drops the ball it rolls to the side and appears to come to a sudden stop. another suggestion would be when he walks past it he slightly kicks it, to me it would show his frustration.

:)

[Alfred_Newman]

Ok, you asked for it.

The animation is a bit stiff (for me). It's very obvious when he walks towrds the camera. You can add a bit of follow-through and overlapping of movements especially when he threw the ball. Your keyframes are too 'obvious'.

You need to exaggerate the fly's acting, You can also add some weight to him so he doesn't look way too light even if he's a fly. You can improve the feet when he 'stumps' on the floor.

You can also do better on the fly's middle arms/legs; they lack some interesting movements. They could help him express more of his emotions or acting in general.

Check out how Pixar did the grasshoppers on their movie "Bug's Life". You'll get some ideas there.

[coreybastiaans]

thanks for the comments, those were especially helpful. I'm going to get to work on some of those keyframes and fix up the ball.

[keithlango]

Since this is the Focused Crits section, I'll get right to it. Take these for what they are: honest crits of what can be improved.

Overall the animation is stiff. You don't have any real lines of action going here. The torso/abdomen sections are stiff as a board and only once at the very end do you even try to bend them.

Spend some time with a pencil and work out some stronger key poses. Right now I break down 3 major poses and one minor one. The 3 main would be 1) back to camera 2) facing camera before, during & after walk 3) turned to the side. The minor pose is when he throws the last challenge out there and he half turns to the camera area. In all 4 poses your line of action is nearly vertical at all times. A straight up and down line isn't terribly interesting. I tend to think of my poses as illustrations. If all I had was one frame to tell the story with this pose, how would I paint/draw it? What would I do with the character's position and body to bring a sense of motion to the game? I think the uninteresting poses are the biggest shortcoming here.
The timing isn't bad overall. You're doing a decent job of figuring out when and where to move, although some of the hand gestures in the end feel a skosh late.

Some other technical things to keep an eye on:
- your transitions from one pose to another are pretty linear. Work on your breakdown keys to emphasize your arcs. This will help loosen things up.

- the timing of the moves are also fairly even. There's not much "texture" here in the speed of your motions. Each action takes roughly the same amount of time as the others, and within the actions themselves there's not much sense of weighting the action to the front or the back of the move. Ease in/out calls for more than making sure your fcurves aren't linear. It has to do with front loading or back loading the motion so that one part is quicker than the other within the move. This adds texture to the motion and adds to the overall sense of something being alive. The first turn around is a good place to examine this.

- Your offsets are not enough. Everything seems to arrive at rest within the same general time (within a few frames). True offset is thinking of which body part you want to emphasize and then allow that part to either arrive early or arrive late to the pose, letting all the other parts play a supporting role to it. This is relly difficult to explain in text. I wish I had a better way to do so.

- your arcs for the arms and legs could be refined better

- your middle arms twin quite a lot.

- the timing of the lipsync is a bit off. You're not hitting the right open/close moments

- check your IK feet in the rig. The feet swim from the ankles down when he moves up and down

It's a good start. You've got some good timings to work with here, and the central idea works. Just look at how you can push this more, especially with your poses.
Good luck!
-k

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