The Little Pirate WIP

#1

This will be my first thread on this forum. I’m currently working on a 3D animation short for school. It’s about a kid that in it’s fantasy cuts off the hand of his father. I’m still working on a good ending but since time’s short I already started working on it. I use a pirate ship that was created by an old classmate of mine and the generic rigs of MooM and Alfred. I post updates of my work on svenstroomberg.tumblr.com and I’ll try to post in this thread as much as possible. I’m a first year 3D animation student in the Netherlands so I would love to get some comments and critics so I can improve as fast as possible.

Enough with the talking, here is some work I’ve done on the project in chronological order:

[vimeo]22836169[/vimeo]

Playblast WIP

(is there a way to embed youtube videos?)

Cheers,
Sven

#2

Playblast version

I finished up my playblasts and with that my basic movements. Now I’m going to refine everything hoping it will look better in the end!

Please leave me some crits and comments :slight_smile:

#3

Pretty sure that I have seen the main character before (the one that cuts off the hand of the other guy)

When working in 3D Industry it is better to stay original. Even though you only learning atm, I suggest you make your own character

#4

That’s right. It’s MooM from creative crash. I’ve chosen to go with a generic rig because I have only 8 weeks to complete this animation. I’m not skilled enough to create my own character rig in this amount of time. My teacher also told us to use generic rigs. The father figure is Alfred which I also downloaded from creative crash. Is there anything you can say about the animation? Thanks!

#5

Oh yeah, animation. Forgot about that.

It is good. Characters seem to move fluidly. The moves look realistic and I am looking forward to seeing a rendered version.

#6

Thanks for the reply! I hope I’ll be able to get a rendered version out that looks solid!

#7

Hi SvenSDesign,
Creating your own little short is always daunting. Keep it up.
I’ll touch on a few points about the animation.

  1. The rope climb- His cog needs to shift from foot to foot, as he climbs.
  2. Speed up the eye darts, they are floating too much. Your eyes should dart, hold, then dart again. Add in some blinks too.
  3. Your sneak is the strongest part of the reel. But I’m kinda feel that the down position isn’t there. After your forward foot contacts; the body shifts its weight over it, and the foot takes the weight of the body.
    Maybe try to position the cog higher on contact and further back, so it goes forward and down on the down position.
  4. The las thing is an editing issue, trim some of the shots at the front or end to make the pacing feel better.

oh… and hide the controllers and put a frame counter in there for the next wip post.
Good Luck!

#8

Thanks for the feedback, I’ll try to get that in with the next steps. What exactly do you mean with the cog? I’ll try experimenting a bit with the length off the shots. And no more controls from here on, I promise :wink:

#9

Centre of gravity -the hips. They need to move side to side as he steps. They are moving up like an elevator right now. You probably need some reference for this.

#10

I figured it’d be something like that. I’ve been downloading some sneak cycles from youtube so I’ll start having a better look at those. Thanks again!

#11

Okay I’ve been working on the first couple of shots. Tried to get all of your feedback in. Please let me know if you see improvement and if there’s more that I should change!

Improvements?

#12

At 0:15 there is something going on with the right leg of the main character. And then a second later the same happense to left leg. It happense in the same area. It there something wrong with your rig?

At 0:18 the left leg just suddenly becomes straight. The transition is not very smooth so work on that.

#13

Hi, SvenSDesign,
SoulArcanium is quite right in his observations.

Moom’s leg rig is not very good. He has skinning problems around his upper thighs and pelvic area. If you push his legs too high up, the geo will just go off model. Very hard to avoid that kind of oddity while still keeping the dynamism of the pose, you could ignore it and come back to tweak later, just get the sneak right 1st.

Hyper-extended IK gives you knee pops, Best to re-pose moom so that you are not pushing his cog too high.

Btw your climb is much better, just get reference for someone climbing. Rock / sport climbing would be better ref than a ladder climb as moom is small compared to the ladder and will have to reach hard for the rungs.

#14

Yea I saw that to but not quiet sure how to fix it. I think I’ll leave that little error in for now due to lack of time but I’ll get into it later on. About the stretching leg, I get what you mean so I’ll try to fix that.

Thanks for the rock climbing reference tip. Had not thought about that yet. I’ll get into that as well.

Lot of work still to do and I have to turn it in next Thursday. So my plan is to work out every shot and smooth all of that out before getting into the little details. I’ll save those for my own spare time after I’ve turned this in. Enough talk, I’m going back to work!

#15

Finally another update! I got every shot smoothed out now. I’m not completely satisfied but probably never will and I feel like this is the best I can deliver for Thursday. Please let me know what can be improved though because I plan on working on this to get it really finished.

From here on I plan on getting all props replaced and create them myself, get in some nice lighting and creating a decent soundtrack.

Crits and comments are most welcome!

Smoothed out animation

#16

I have no idea what is up with your rig but it keeps twitching all the time. I suggest that you use a paint tool to make sure that the movements dont affect the other bones too much. Also, is it a smooth or ridig?

#17

Where do you see it twitching? The sneak shot or more shots? I’m not skilled with rigging but I’ll see what I can do. If you could tell me which shots are going wrong I could go in and try to fix it. What’s the difference between smooth or redig? I smoothed it out through an attribute that’s added to the main control to adjust the smoothness.

Any word on the animation in general apart from those twitches?

Thanks for the comment!

#18

At 0:13 - 0:14some deformation occurs on left side of his belly. And after that legs and the hips keep twitching. You honestly can see it?

There are two binds - Rigid and Smooth. Basically after you finished working on the rig you rigid bind it or smooth bind it. In rigid bind is not as flexible as smooth bind which is the reason I prefer smooth.

If your character was smooth binded then you can use a 'paint skin weight ’ tool to make sure that the right body skin parts are assigned to each bone.

#19

Yea I see that, I thought you’ve seen more twitches. I already mentioned that I’ll work on that later after I’d finish the rest of the animation.

I don’t know if it is a smooth or rigid bind since it’s a generic rig and I don’t know how it is created. I’ll take a look and see if I can paint it somewhere this weekend.

This is what desmondying says about the rig:

Moom’s leg rig is not very good. He has skinning problems around his upper thighs and pelvic area. If you push his legs too high up, the geo will just go off model. Very hard to avoid that kind of oddity while still keeping the dynamism of the pose, you could ignore it and come back to tweak later, just get the sneak right 1st.

#20

Yeah. Its important to know what area you want to specialize in. I assume you are going for an animator position, since you chose to use moom, to allow you more time to animate. It would kinda defeat the purpose of using a “off the shelve” rig by breaking it apart and re-skin it when your ultimate aim is to animate.

So on to your animation then.

  1. your timing is still way too slow. I’m not talking about the arm falling off. The antic to strike after the sneak feels like moom is drifting from pose to pose, what you need is a quicker action followed by a moving hold. Plus the parts at 31sec till the end could be sped up a lot more. Film reference to get a handle on timing.

  2. Arcs. When the pirate picks his hand up from the floor, his hand goes in a straight line down and follows the same path of action up. try a scooping up action or an inward snatch to make it appealing.

Anyway, some of the overlapping action you have on the cut arm is working nicely.