Head turn attempt

[Stephen X]

It needs some tweaking, but here's my first pass. It was pretty easy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGwGe8UCyHs

[Lumpy]

Effin' smartbones, am I right? Looks very crisp. Kinda reminded me of a Mii.

[funksmaname]

not bad
only thing i noticed is that the hair flick doesn't go under the face when it should. Also, the turn is so linear it doesn't look natural - if the body rotated it would look like a camera rotation... keep at it!

[Stephen X]

Thanks Lumpy and Funksmaname. My friends kid me that the characters look like Miis and that the female character looks like Michael Jackson:) The animation was just to test the head moving so I locked the neck to just see the head turn. Thanks for pointing out the hair. For some reason it didn't jump back behind the head and I was able to easily fix it.

Doing the head turn wasn't that bad. I made copies of the character and created different views. Then made a smart bone and used the different views as a guide for the different states. Here is a gif animation of the different views of the character before making a smart bone.



Here is the female character that looks like Michael:)

[Danimal]

The character desperately needs to go to a doctor pronto. Heads don't turn that far around without damage happening.

[justoshow]

The character desperately needs to go to a doctor pronto. Heads don't turn that far around without damage happening.

Ha ha! But it was a very good attempt!

[Stephen X]

Here's a second pass at the turn. I still have more tweaks.

[heyvern]

Great job!

I have done a similar head turn with smart bones.
During my process I used one smart bone with two actions, left to right. The actions started front view and then turned left or right to a full back view. This gave me a smooth side to side front turn and could turn all the way to the back, but I couldn't get a smooth side to side from the back view because each action stops at back view.

To fix this I added a full 360 turn to both SB actions (over rotation of the bone so the actions don't conflict) to create a smooth turn with the back view of the character.

I was wondering how you split up the actions or if you used multiple bones or actions? It looks like you have a full smooth turn all the way around and was curious what you did.

[Stephen X]

Hey Vern!

I tweaked the head move some more. It's all done on one bone. The bone is in the head just like Funksmaname's tutorial with the female character with the hand and the skirt.

I have the bone pointing straight up like his and in the head, connected to a neck pivot. The front view is at 90 degrees and every pose is at a 45 degree increment. To turn the head completely around, I just place a keyframe at 270 for the left side of the bone and then another keyframe on the next frame, positioning the bone to the 270 degree rotation of the right side of the bone. I'm planning on writing about the process this week for my blog. Here's the most recent version of the head:)


Oh and thanks for all your videos. They helped me to get to this point with smart bones and I can't thank you enough. Do you have any finished pieces online? I love your character designs!

S:)

[Danimal]

There's one thing that stands out and it's the position of the neck. The neck is at the base of the skull. When the head turns to the side, the neck should go straight up to the back of the head. Yours stays right in the middle, making the head look like it's impaled and spinning on something. Or more like the head isn't moving at all and everything else is just sliding around on it.

[Stephen X]

Thanks for the observation Danimal. I've only moved the head so far. I'm hoping to move the rest of the body this week

[Danimal]

No, no, not related to the body. When a head turns, the whole thing appears to move forward on the neck. The face doesn't end up where the side of the head was previously, but forward of that position. The back of the head also moves up to be flat against the neck. The neck and body don't move.

[Stephen X]

I'm not sure what you're saying. This isn't an animation of a head turn. It's using smart bones to turn the character around. It's so I can use the character in different angles. Anything that I did with the design of the head are stylistic choices and not made to represent reality. It is a cartoon. People do not have lollipop heads (I hope) in real life.

I noticed that none of your character have necks.

S

[Danimal]

This isn't an animation of a head turn.

Ah yes. As both the title of the thread and the video say "head turn," I'm not sure why I foolishly thought that it was a head turn.

I also grasped within at least the first 15, maybe 30 viewings that it was a cartoon, but appreciate your pointing it out. It just looks like stuff is sliding around on the face, not so much that anything is turning. I was trying to suggest a way to make it look more like an actual turn. Your original animated GIF is actually more convincing of the turn.

Don't take any of this personally, by the way. People have been trying these head turns for a long, long time. They never look natural, it's just kind of the nature of the beast.

[lwaxana]

I think the thing Danimal is noticing is that your character design has the neck attaching to the exact center of the bottom of the head. On real human beings the neck is actually closer to the back of the head. A typical character rotation would rotate about the axis of the neck/spine so the front of the head would be further from that axis than the back of the head. Your rotation is also rotating about the axis of the spine, but that also happens to be the center of the head. So it looks different in rotation from what most viewers expect. It's hard to explain in words, but the side view of the character shows the issue. If you moved the head more to the forward side of the neck, it would look more convincing.

By the way, this looks really cool! I'm still on a pre-smartbones version of AS, but someday when I get there, I'll look closer at how you did this!