2 characters in a scene at once

#1

Hey,

Does anyone know an efficient way to have two or more characters in a scene at once? And how to go about animating that.

Cheers,
Ben

#2

block out booth actions an reactions then do the facial on each jus a qiuck run down

#3

If you have them in different scenes just merge them together :slight_smile:

#4

Hi,

I don’t want to act great and provide a solution on my own. So here’s a good one that I read and it makes sense.

http://www.animationtipsandtricks.com/2009/11/how-do-you-animate-fight.html

It also helps to know if you are animating on a Pose-to-Pose method or a Straight Ahead animating method.

Some tips that I got from the article:

  1. Staging is very important. It must look good also in silhouette.
  2. Set down at least a few Key Poses
  3. You can decide which character has the principle action and animate that first. The second can be adjusted to fit in.
  4. From my point of view, a mix of Pose-to-Pose and Straight ahead animating would help. Why straight ahead? Well not every moment can be planned on just storyboard/video reference. Sometime things might not just cut it/may not be practical. This is where you can put in your own flavor.

Hope this helps :slight_smile:

#5

thumbnail thumbnail thumbnail

know EXACTLY what you are attempting in your first pass before you commit to moving ANY pixels.

planning > planning > planning > common sense > emotion

in that order

#6

Thanks everyone :slight_smile:

I’ve completed the animation, so u basically animate it the same way you do an individual character. I thought there would b some technical thing or something. Turns out a hell of a lot easier than what I thought.

Cheers,

Ben

#7

Great… post it online :slight_smile:

#8

I have exported it, and tried it on youtube, but, there is no audio. Does anyone know how 2 get it working properly? I’ve tried using .mov and .mp4

Cheers

Ben

#9

How did you export the finished animation? Even if it is .mov or.mp4, the codec matters. Plus…is the audio quality good? 44.1 kHz?

#10

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2pirSVG6NI I’ve tried most of the popular codecs, but can’t get it 2 work. This is it anyway.

Cheers,

Ben

#11

Hi there,

Good morning. I’ve put up these observations after looking at the video about 7 times.

  1. The Blue character has a few frozen poses. Especially in 3d animation there can be no frozen holds. You need to change them to “Moving Holds”

  2. The Brown character goes into different poses as if it were floating. It means that they move a the same acceleration from one point to another. Check out reference videos. Humans do not move with the same acceleration unless they are practicing Tai Chi.

  3. The center of gravity of the Blue character seems to be a little off. Seems like there is an invisible stool supporting him other than his feet.

  4. Check the hand and finger movements on the Blue character with reference videos. They seem to be something like puppets rather than being realistic human or cartoony style animation.

Its a good first pass on the overall. Next time just put up an .avi playblast. It’s smaller and mostly sound has no problem. Looking forward to see the updated video. Good work.

#12

Thanks bad-j :slight_smile:

I’m on a mac, haven’t found the .avi option in maya yet.

I’ve got really subtle moves in there, but I totally see what you mean, I am going to increase the readability of them.

I definitely have to go over the fingers aye lol.

I’ll try and work on the balance of weight on the blue character by moving it forward and fix the follow through on the brown. With the acceleration would you be able to explain it a bit more, sorry.

Cheers,

Ben Nicoloff

#13

You may know this under another name…“Ease in/Ease out”. Human hand movements while talking move a little snappy, i.e., the hand begins to move slowly and picks up the pace and slows down towards the end of the action(mostly done to avoid hitting other objects or coming on as being too forceful in the conversation). At the “Ease out” stage a secondary motion would happen such as a forward rotation in the wrists.

Now steady acceleration can be seen in any Tai-Chi breathing exercise/ a person thinking of something(broken hearted) while he unconsciously is doing something like arranging his desk ‘pointlessly’.

If this isn’t any clearer, then it is because I am trying to squeeze in a lot of info into a small post. Check out “ease-in/out” in books like “Animator’s survival kit”, “Timing for animation” and Disney’s “Illusion of Life” (of course).

Cheers :slight_smile:

#14

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