Cute little skipping dinosaur

[willf]

This is the first 30 seconds of animation from "The T Stands for Justice", a work in progress about a T-Rex that fights for truth, justice, and birthdays.

Eventually this shot will be broken into two, with the title appearing in between.




Okay here's the shot with a recolor on the background:



Hopefully now the little T-Rex gal won't disappear into the scenery quite so much.

[Danimal]

That is a cute dinosaur indeed. The only kind of weird moment was when the entire background was taken up by a hill and looked like a plain green background. Otherwise, very nice!

[willf]

That background needs more work, it's true.

I was interested in how they did all the backgrounds for that Puffin Island Series.

All I can guess is that they painted the different pieces of scenery using ASP brushes, rendered them as PNGs, then reimported them into the final scenes.

[ddrake]

Nice job, the skip looks good and I'm still a fan of the character design. My first thought, similar to Danimal:

The only kind of weird moment was when the entire background was taken up by a hill and looked like a plain green background.

But for me it's more in the color palette itself. I think that hill-green is a little overbearing and distracting whether it takes up the whole background or not. I think the color works ok,but in very small doses, (edges, highlights, etc) more like what you have with the trees, and the land in the background.

I think the character color is pretty bright, but a fine choice, but you'd want you character to stand over the backgrounds and here he's visually getting lost in it in spite of the fun animation work.

Also, and this is without context of a full ep. I don't know that we want to see this for the first full 30 seconds of the show. It looks good, but it is just skipping.

[muhire]

Nice animation, and super character design with fine outline and layout, keep moving man!

[Víctor Paredes]

Fantastic. It's incredible how you have improved your character animation. I really enjoyed the dinosaur attitude you got with his body.
I will be waiting for more.

[humanistheart]

Lol, that is a cute dino. Did you move the dinosaur or move the background to make it look like the dino was moving?

[willf]

Thank you for the replies.

I went back into the .anme file and recolored the background. Now perhaps she won't disappear into the scenery so much. (Posted at the top of the page) Of course that scenery is going to need more work before I am happy with it, but hopefully it looks a bit better, now.

Thanks for the compliments, as well. I guess you can tell that I have put most of my effort into learning character animation. If you like the way the character moves, you can chalk it up to all the time I spent watching someone's webinars on using ASP.

I realize it drags a bit with her skipping for 27 seconds straight, but eventually the scene will be split into two, with the film's title in between. And I am planning on putting in some more secondary action as well, which will probably take the form of other dinos in the background.

[willf]

humanistheart,

oops.

Edit: She is moving along the background and the camera is panning along with her. I saw that there was noticeable sliding both when she first starts, and when she goes into that big jump at the end.

So, I went in and added movement to her layer specifically during those times to try and reduce it. Using onion skins to note where her foot touched the ground and then advancing down the timeline to where her foot left the ground, I would translate her layer closer to where it was earlier so there was very little to no layer translation at all while her foot was on the ground. Hope that makes sense.

[humanistheart]

Thanks for the reply Do you get that thing too where the character/background starts moving slowly at the beginning and slows down at the end? I've had trouble with that when I do a long background.

[willf]

humanistheart:

<I>Do you get that thing too where the character/background starts moving slowly at the beginning and slows down at the end? I've had trouble with that when I do a long background</i>.

Yes, exactly. I think it's a combination of things causing that problem.

1.) Simply having too much distance between keyframes. I think the interpolation gets a bit confused if you don't tell it what to do every second or so. Not sure about the causation but that is what seems to happen.

2.) Using "smooth" interpolation where there is too much time between keyframes.

I had the same problem with camera movement and was able to get better results by using "linear" interpretation for those keys where there is a lot of distance between them, and even by adding keyframes (where I had thought them unnecessary, originally) to help "remind" the interpolation software where I wanted the camera to be.

Also, as I wrote in my previous post, sometime you have to go in and add keyframes manually to keep your layer from sliding around where its not wanted.

Or, I could put all my dinosaurs on ice skates.

Adding: After running some experiments, I think it has to be the "smooth" interpolation that causes the problem (where the character/background starts moving slowly at the beginning and slows down at the end). The smooth interpretation is designed to start and end slowly and speed up in the middle. Using it between keyframes that are a good distance apart would magnify the effect. I have gotten good results by switching to linear interpretation in some of these instances.