Walk Cycle Test

amanandink · Post by **amanandink** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 10:38 pm

Hi All

We are working on a tv series trailer we have i development and have been planing to do the animation in Anime Studio, but we want to try and keep a traditional look, such as being able to use smears and switching between 1s and 2s. I am not entirely sure we can get everything we want but here is an example of a walk cycle test we did of a wolf character.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTifYrK_b5g

The animator keyed it out into Pencil and then the quicktime movie was brought into Anime and matched with the on model character. Works well I think.

We are planning to do the entire trailer like this and have already keyed the animation and are now in the process of re-matching in Anime Studio, for anyone interested you can keep track of our progress and seem other artwork from the show here.
www.amanandink.com/news

any comments or suggests are greatly welcomed, thanks

Jeremy
a Man & Ink

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 11:04 pm

WOW!

This is great. But I wonder why you go the AS way if you've already done that much animation in bitmap format? Just for the smooth lines and having to color everything only once?

human · Post by **human** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 11:15 pm

Hmm, this is related:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijOW3nhN ... re=related

Hiroshige meets The Book of Kells.

amanandink · Post by **amanandink** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 11:17 pm

Hi and thanks Slowtiger

our thinking behind using AS was to cut down on the on animation, this being a test and also sometimes in the trailer too I think the animators did more animation than may have been needed, we really want to get to the stage where a show is essentially just really really good storyboard poses, with some breakdowns if need for the animator to follow then it is sent to AS.

We looked and kinda used the show Pocoyo as the guide for this, (a excellent blog by the way) this post from their blog in-particular http://pocoyo.blogs.com/pocoyo/2007/02/ ... refer.html
Their animation has a great 2d feel about it, with lots of fast movement and working key to key. Hand-drawn animation is getting rather expensive in western europe and we started looking for ways to achieve the same look but cheaper.

also we wanted to try and get a texture on to the characters, like they had been painted in and with AS we could animate and bend the texture with the animation, as opposed to just using a mask effect.

Sorry for the long drawn out answer to your short question.

J

amanandink · Post by **amanandink** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 11:23 pm

Hmm, this is related:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijOW3nhN ... re=related

Hiroshige meets The Book of Kells

Yeah human

thats from a feature I worked on as efx supervisor and we used a mixture of AS and hand-drawn (in toon boom) to create those waves. AS was also used later in the film to move foliage when the main character is walking through long grass in the forest, so much more cost effect than building the grass in 3d. the film is due for release in Sept 08 I think.

J

ulrik · Post by **ulrik** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 11:24 pm

This is looking really good, I like the movements you have in the animation!
I wish you all luck with the project!

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Thu Feb 14, 2008 10:28 am

OK, that makes sense. For a series it's worth to build and rig the characters, but for a one-shot it would be overkill.

Nice characters and very good animation. I didn't get much from the story, but I'm far from being you target audience ...

BTW if you're in search for experienced AS animators, contact me ... if you have paid gigs to offer!

PatrickS · Post by **PatrickS** » Thu Feb 14, 2008 11:15 am

Hey jeremy. I worked on Brendan for a brief period as well and was amazed to hear that AS was used on Brendan in the end, because nobody at the studio really knew the program when I was around. I'm anxious to see what you guys will be conjuring up with AS. I do feel that a lot was lost in the translation from the original penciltest walk though.

Kadoogan · Post by **Kadoogan** » Thu Feb 14, 2008 10:37 pm

Fantastic character design and animation. Can't wait to see the final results!

amanandink · Post by **amanandink** » Thu Feb 14, 2008 11:50 pm

thanks guys for all the nice comments, but yeah it does lose something, i think it has something to do with not being able to change the timing, go from 2s to 1s and back again, and the inbetweening is just to perfect, it loses the hand drawn quality. But its all about trade offs and what you can live with, animation wise.

J

krabat haskerson · Post by **krabat haskerson** » Sat Feb 16, 2008 4:53 am

excellent example of professionalism...