Thinking Outside the Box

Today I had a breakthrough. I'm normally hesitant about using that word as I'm very critical of the drawings and animations that I produce, but tonight's effort I think deserves it, if indeed I may say so myself.

In my last post I mentioned finding some tips from Animation Mentor. I also posted some little stick figures from one of the tips. I decided to try animating that sequence of drawings tonight, which was of a character picking up a box - an animation excercise which makes one think a lot about weight and timing. Incidently, I have discovered that I get very nervous when I have animated a sequence and am waiting to see it playing on a screen. I wonder if other animators feel this too. Anyway, here's my pencil test:

Box Lift
Uploaded by andylatham82

Upon seeing this, my mood changed from nervous to delighted. Although I had approximately followed the key drawings from the previous post, I managed to work out the timing and the spacing of the drawings myself. Until now, all of my 2D animations have had equally spaced inbetweens. However in this one I took care to have the character slowly getting his grip on the box (more inbetween drawings), and then quickly pulling it up into the air (fewer inbetween drawings). The little animation chart I drew on frame 1 shows this:
You might notice some of the frames have negative numbers. This is because I forgot to draw them, and had to add them in later! You just can't get the staff....

If I may pat myself on the back a little more, I am also pleased with the little movement I put on the foot nearest the box as the character moves to take hold of it. It happens because he needs to get his foot as close to the box as possible in order to lift it.

However, as pleased as I am with this animation, what really got to me most was my girlfriend's reaction to it. She actually shed a few tears and told me how proud of me she was. I guess she has watched me struggling to improve over the past year or so, getting frustrated and feeling lost from time to time, and now I have finally had some success. This is the very first time I have actually felt like I have significantly improved since I began. It is for this reason that I have uttered the word "breakthrough".

Tips

My apologies for not posting in a few days, I haven't had time to do anything new. I'm currently trying to rebuild my portfolio website as lots of people have told me that it loads too slowly due to the large file sizes of the graphics on it. Until yesterday I hadn't been able to find a way to reduce the file sizes, whilst keeping the images (and their shadows) looking nice. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I have decided to rebuild the site using Flash rather than standard html. This allows me to have small file sizes, pretty graphics and even animated buttons and stuff.

Unfortunately there is a drawback.....I have no idea how to do it! I'm currently lacking in a lot of Flash skills. Having said that though, I have been reading some tutorial sites and I think I can learn it pretty quickly (at least the parts of it that I need) as the animation side of Flash isn't that tricky (far less complicated than the 3D animation software I'm used to using) and the programming side of it doesn't seem to be too different from programming in C++, a language I learned at university. I actually built a test home page in Flash last night and it didn't take too long, so expect to see a new site up soon!

Right, I should post something of interest to animators while I'm here! Yesterday I was browsing a great animation forum and found a link to a monthly newsletter from the guys at Animation Mentor. While the newsletter in general doesn't really interest me, it has one great section containing animation tips. So if you want to have a look at this month's tips, go here.
You can get to previous months' tips by changing the numbers in the URL. You can also sign up to future newsletters on the main Animation Mentor site (in the bottom left corner).

What a Dummy

Since taking the plunge and starting to animate, I'm managing to post much more regularly for some reason. I won't complain though, and I hope that you won't complain either!

I had so much fun making my very simple snowman stop motion animation that I decided to make a couple more. I decided to use an artist's mannequin as my character:

Quiver 1
Uploaded by andylatham82

Again, it's only simple, but it was fun to make. After I made it though, the mannequin, who I'm calling Quiver (anyone who remembers The Generation Game from TV may know why) was harrassed by a small blue creature. I managed to capture it on film:

Quiver 2
Uploaded by andylatham82

Finally, I mentioned a couple of days ago that I was working on an animation for a swimming pool company. I haven't finished it yet, but I rendered it out today just to see what it turned out like. Since I might not be working on it for another week or so, I thought I'd post it here:

Medal
Uploaded by andylatham82

Right, I had better get animating again to try and keep this a DAILY blog!

A Walk in the Snow

For those of you who have not tired of my endless posts about walk cycles, I have another one for you!

Yesterday I decided to try to make my own walk cycle, rather than continue to copy the ideas given in "The Animator's Survival Kit". So I began with two contact drawings, just like before, and then changed the passing position drawing to be something of my own creation. I think I have ended up with something out of Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks!

Silly Walk
Uploaded by andylatham82

You might have noticed that the quality of my pencil test is better than in previous posts. This is a result of obtaining a new webcam. I think the old one was in danger of becoming fossilised!

As I was testing the camera, I ended up making a little stop-motion video with a funny looking snowman that my girlfriend made out of Blu-Tak:

Snowman
Uploaded by andylatham82

Well it made me laugh anyway.

A Full Day of Animation

Still following "The Animator's Survival Kit", I took the next step in my learning of walk cycles. In my last post I showed you my attempt at a walk that was simplified to three main drawings: the two contacts and a passing position. I also mentioned that the walk can be made dramatically different just by changing the passing position drawing. So that's what I have done:

Bounce Walk
Uploaded by andylatham82

Now while his head obviously moves up and down through the cycle, and his body clearly contorts, his hips don't actually move up and down that much, so there is still a feeling of floating on the bottom half of the character - and this is after I was trying to be careful to make sure that there was variation in the height! I guess I need exaggerate the difference in height more.

I loved yesterday. I got to spend the whole day animating. At work I was working on an animation for a company called Total Swimming, which is run by Olympian Steve Parry. We are editing a film for him and he wants an animated version of his logo to go at the start. If you look at their website, you will see the simple medal logo they use. I don't often get to do animation at work, and when I do, I'm usually just simply moving objects around in 3ds Max. I didn't want to do that again this time, so I spent some time trying to put some life into the medal. I'm still working on the animation, but here is a still:
The idea is that the medal jumps off a diving board, and on it's way down gets caught on a ribbon. I'll post the animation when it's finished.

Finally, I was looking at some peoples' animations on the internet that they had made during their Animation Mentor studies. After jealously muttering under my breath "I wish I could afford to follow that course", I found out that Animation Mentor supplies all its students with rigs to play with in whatever 3D software they use. After quickly realising that these rigs were not available anywhere except from AM, I decided to hunt for a decent substitute.

Some time ago I did find a good rig called LowMan, which I made an animation with. However I found a better one. It's called Cryptic AR. It can only be used in 3Ds Max, but it is a professional rig used at Cryptic Studios. Anyway, to test it out I decided to try a walk cycle:

Walk
Uploaded by andylatham82

I thought I had got everything right when I was animating it, but when I came to see the rendered version, I noticed that the feet seem to slide along the floor a little. The more I look at it, the more I see mistakes, mainly around the feet and legs. For example, the legs don't straighten out at any point in the walk which looks odd, and he spends too much time on his heels - the soles of the feet don't hit the floor early enough in each step.

Conscious About My Weight

In my last post I talked about how Richard Williams describes that a walk cycle can be built from three drawings: two contacts and a passing position. The walk test that I posted had five main drawings: two contacts, a passing position, a down and an up. Therefore simplifying the building of a walk would be good.

Just to remind you, here is that walk:

Walk Test
Uploaded by andylatham82

Tonight I tried the three drawing method, adding two inbetweens for each step, one between each contact and passing position. Here's the result:

Walk Test 2
Uploaded by andylatham82

Now in theory these two clips should be close to identical, but as you may be able to see (excusing the poor video quality) the second is a bit too floaty. I laid all the frames on top of each other in Photoshop to have proper look at how they fit together and noticed that there isn't much variation between the high and low positions in the second step of the walk.
I'm not sure how this happened, because for the second step, I simply traced the drawings from the first step. It seems to be the seventh drawing - the second passing position - that is the culprit. In this particular walk, the passing positions are supposed to be the 'ups' and the contact positions are the 'downs'. I think it's actually a good demonstration of how height variation, or lack of it, affects the feeling of weight. I'd better take more care next time!

Next I plan to vary the drawing used for the passing position to create different walks.

I Walk the Line

I've only gone and done some animation at last!

Well it's nothing too impressive, just a simple walk, but it's enough to have given me the animation bug. I love seeing my drawings come to life. Every time I see them, I want to animate more. So here is what I just made:

It's as much an experiment with making a line tester as it is an experiment in animation (so excuse the poor quality, I'll explain the reason below). I'll come to that in a moment though. This walk is similar to one I made ages ago and was produced with the help of Richard Williams's 'Animation Survival Kit'. I haven't added inbetweens, but I don't feel that I need to at this stage in the learning process. In his book, Richard explains basic methods of building walks, which usually start out with 'contact positions', where the figure is balanced, just making contact with the ground after a step. A 'passing position' is then added between these with the body raised up slightly. Then a 'down' position is drawn between the first contact and the passing position, with the body lowered to give a feeling of weight. Finally an 'up' position is added, with the body reaching it's highest level in the cycle. Here's how Richard shows it (click to enlarge):
So that's as far as I have got so far (although I haven't yet added arms!). However, next Richard goes on to describe how the walk can be simplified into three main drawings: the contacts and the passing position. The idea is that you make the passing position the highest point and then simply add inbetweens between these three drawings. The power of this is that by merely changing the passing position, you can invent all sorts of different walks, as Richard shows here (click to enlarge):
So my next task is to play around with this!

Oh yeah, I mentioned my line testing system. It's somewhat of a work in progress, as you can see from the poor quality results! I quickly tire of having to scan drawings into the computer just to test whether my animations work or not, so I figured I would try to rig up a camera so that i can quickly capture each frame. Scanning is a pain the the bum for two reasons: it is hard to keep all the drawings lined up with each other, and 12 field animation paper is too big for my A4 scanner!

I decided a simple webcam would suffice as the camera, particularly as they come with a decent resolution these days. Then it's just a matter of finding a way to fix it in position above my drawings. I was eager to try this all out, but didn't have any of the required components, so I dug out a VERY old webcam from a dusty box behind the sofa and used Blu-Tak to stick it to the underneath of a table. I then took the animation disk off my drawing table and laid it on the floor under the camera. As you can see in the above animation, the results are at best poor!

Clearly Blu-Tak is not the best method of fixing a camera in place, since is moves slightly over time. The poor image quality obviously will be improved with a newer webcam and some better lighting will be needed. I also need to find some software to make capturing the images faster. For this one, I captured directly from the webcam in Photoshop, which is fine, but I had to save all the files as jpegs and then use Quicktime to string them all together into a video. I want to find a program that can capture the images and play them in sequence straight away. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Basically this was just a proof of concept rather than a finished line tester. I intend to make something more suitable soon!

Unsteady on My Feet

I'm trying to do some walk cycles at the moment but am having trouble...as usual! I have been taking tips from The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams. In the book, Richard uses very simple characters to illustrate his points, which is a good idea I think, but I find myself trying to use simple characters too. So what's the problem? Well I have been spending so long learning a sophisticated range of drawing techniques, that going back to an almost child-like form of drawing is surprisingly difficult!

I've tried to draw in a more complex way than Richard does, but my control over proportion isn't quite developed enough to pull it off. So I'm in limbo at the moment. I'll keep trying though, so keep watching for some walks soon!

In the meantime, here are some doodles I just did with a Sharpie marker:

Share the Knowledge!

Right, I have noticed that the comments on my blog are getting rarer and rarer. While it's nice to receive compliments on my work, the main reason comments are so important to me is that they are a learning tool for me. I can find out from all you people whether I'm doing things correctly or not.

So to try to combat the situation, I have created a forum to try to spark some discussion, particularly amongst newbies like myself. To save myself the effort of typing it all out again, here's how I have described the forum on the forum:

Okay, I don't know whether this is a good idea or not, but I have started this forum to try to get some discussion amongst animation (in any of its numerous forms) newbies.

I am one myself and have been trying to improve my drawing skills over the last year or so with the hope of one day becoming a professional animator. I have found that quite regularly I have become downhearted and have wondered which way to turn next, due to the fact that I am completely self taught and so don't have any particular curriculum to follow or teacher to guide me.

I'm sure there must be a lot of people out there in the same situation, a lot of who get so lost in it all that they give up.

So my idea is for all these people to join me and help each other.

If you are looking for advice, or have some to offer; if you are receiving proper tuition yourself and want to share your newly learned knowledge, or if you are a professional animator who would like to spare some time to help others climbing the learning ladder, please join in with this forum!

The forum can be found here for any of you who are interested. I hope that some will join in, not only for my benefit, but for their own and for others.

Thanks!

Eye Draw Some More

I haven't had much chance to post in the last couple of days, but i have still been drawing away merrily!

Still following the "Natural Way to Draw" book, I moved on from contour drawings and began on the next subject: gesture drawing. Now gestures are something I have been doing for a while, but I guess in terms of what the book describes, I have only been doing half-gestures. I have always tried to make sure each drawing, while loose and flowing, still resembled a person. However the book describes gestures more as an artist workout, rather than the beginning of a more developed drawing. It says one is supposed to avoid drawing the figure, but rather draw what the figure is doing. It doesn't matter if the drawing is unintelligible to anyone else (or yourself after you have forgotten what the pose was). The author talks about his students tossing drawings aside without even looking at them as it is not the final drawing that matters, more the experience of doing the drawing. In that sense, it is much the same as contour drawing. Anyway, here are some of my attempts:
While they still resemble humans, they are a bit more raw than my usual style. You may notice they are all drawn on scrap paper. If I'm to be discarding drawing upon drawing, I don't want to be paying for the paper! The length of time taken to create each drawing varied from about 20 seconds to about 5 seconds. According to the book, one should aim to make a representation of every part of the figure in the first couple of seconds.

On a separate note, I have been practicing drawing eyes over the last couple of days too. It started with me just doodling an eye on a scrap of paper and deciding that I really need to practice things like that. I intended to sit down with a book full of faces and draw eyes, noses and mouths and everything in order to really get to grips with them. I figured that, as with human anatomy in general, the more you know about how real humans look, the better prepared you are to deform, characature and animate them. Unfortunately though, I haven't had time to do this studying. However over the past couple of days I have found myself drawing eyes in the few bits of spare time at work or at home. I haven't used real eyes for reference, I have just tried to draw a better version of what I think an eye looks like each time. What I find curious is that I have improved. Here's what I started out with:
A day later, I drew these:
Then finally, today I drew this:
While I haven't spent any time looking at real eyes to compare, I feel quite pleased with this last effort. I'm not suggesting that everyone should forget drawing from reference and do things this way, I just thought I'd post it as a sort of artistic curiosity.