Moho Forum

DK: No offense taken. I can agree to most of what you say. If a tool exists to make your work easier, by all means use it!

I just see such a mass of slow procedural animation everywhere that I can't help to think "why don't those people learn the principles of animation first". There's a similar trend in this forum, where many a newbie asks for most complicated rigs or the mythical "make my animation look perfect" button instead of learning the basic tricks of the trade first.

Procedural animation (the part which can be done with algorithms: all automatic inbetweens and interpolations) has quite a distinct look which, at least for my eye, is completely different from anything hand-made; at least when used without much thinking or tweaking. It is great for anything mechanical, machines or vehicles or moving backgrounds. But for character movement I think it should be avoided, or its use at least restricted. I found that I shouldn't place motion keyframes further apart than somewhere between 6 and 12 frames in order to keep the movement lively and fresh. Everything with longer increments makes the animation too slow. (This is a rule of thumb only, of course.)

This of course is a matter of aesthetics and therefore depends on every animator's personal taste. Right now I prefer "jerkiness", this may change next month without further notice ...

Slowtiger, I still don't get what you meant in your first comment by a tricky rig? There IS no tricky rig? It's simply interpolation? Coming from a 3D background where we use tricky rigs all the time it sounded like you were having a "GO" whch is not in line with the spirit of the AS forum or appropriate for a "TIPS" thread.

Genete....I don't know how I missed that. Thanks for putting the link in.

Cheers
D.K

Hello all

DK wrote:hope no 3D animaors are reading this thread

If I meet one I will redirect him/her to this thread!

Rigging can be a bitch, if you rig too tightlly, you endup restricting yourself, let me explain. Many years ago, I had a look at the rig of the Gozilla model (1998 film)

The riggers made it so that most of the secondary animation was automated, the rig was huge, had over 60000 lines of scripting and all done in softimage (Softimage before XSI which was a pain in a nun's butt)

The riggers we're immensally proud of it, it was a technical marvel, but the animators(3 of them) hated it because it was restricting.

Another project, smaller in magnitude was Pinocchio 3000, which I worked on, the principal characters had homemade rigs, which, even though tons less complex then the Gozilla one was still too restricting, we(the animators) had to go and talk to the riggers, which wanted to hear nothing so we went to the TD whos had no idea the darn thing was so complicated. We ended up using a scaled down version of the rig, which did not automate as many things but gave us the freedom we needed to animate.

AS Pro is a 2D application, I do understand that rigs are way cool to push back some of AS Pro limitations but for the most part, a complicated rig can only restrain your creativity, maybe you'll endup creating more keyframes using a less complicated rig, but you will also have all the freedom in the world, inside the software limitations of course.

That brings me to another touchy subject, software limitations, every software has those, even the most expensive piece of software has limitations, they are usually less noticeable.

In other words, work with the limitations of the software, find workarounds for those limitations but dont overthink everything or you may endup creating a workaround or technique that will actually make things more complicated then what they we're before you develloped the technique.

Darn, did I write all of this? Must be in eccess of sugar!

GC