Stepped to Smooth tutorial – part 4

In part 4 we finally start looking into the smoothing process. We begin with a short study of the inherent timing cheat involved in stepped animation. Enjoy!

Stepped to Smooth tutorial – part 3

 

Enjoy :)

Stepped to Smooth tutorial – part 2

In the second part of the tutorial, we add some motion info to our raw acting keys. I show how to use the tweenMachine script to introduce inbeweens and breakdowns.

I’m using here a very old version of tweenMachine here (an old dog likes his old tricks). The new version has a far more advanced UI and the numbers work a bit differently, but the essence of its function stays the same.

Stepped to Smooth tutorial – part 1

This took much much more time than I had expected. In the end, the only thing I’m entirely pleased about is the little guitar tune I played :)

Brave Little Tailor - animation exercise

I watched the Disney short "Brave Little Tailor" for the first time the other day, and one sequence clearly stood out with complex animation and great appeal. It was the sequence in which Mickey tells the king his tale of bravery. I later discovered it was animated by Frank Thomas, which explains the outstanding quality.

I was inspired to do a classic animation exercise with it. Here's what I did: I quick-sketched about 20 drawings that seemed to be the major key drawing (they are the ones with the circled frame numbers). Then, I animated the scene according to theses keys, without looking at the original scene again. The idea was to compare my results with the original animation, and see what I might have done better. It was a great exercise and I feel I learned a lot from it. The result also shows, I think, how solidly you can define 4 seconds of animation with just 20 very quick sketches.

Note: YouTube is apparently not so good with short videos like this (it won't play it through. To get a better look at it, try the mp4 file here.

Superhero comics style chick

This is something I did for Hands Up studio a little while back. The semi-realistic, anatomical superhero comics style is not something I have much experience with , so I was glad (and a bit scared) of the opportunity to try it out. In the end, I think I pulled it off reasonably well.

It got canned, by the way. Turns out what the client really really wanted was an owl.  :-D

 

Abstract City: art outside the box

This is beautiful, this is one of my best finds yet. It’s a blog on the “New Yorker” site. It’s too rare to find something which is both “arty” and fun; artists tend to take themselves so seriously! Anyway, have a look, and make sure to check out some older entries. Here’s a good one to get you started:

I Lego NY