Thursday 29 December 2011

Animation: equipment test1



A quick and dirty job to test how my camera is behaving with DragonFrame. I don't have any lights on the set yet so the image quality is pretty grainy (long 2 seconds exposure shots with ISO settings maxed out). 

Besides, I think I managed to cram all the "not to do's" in those 4 seconds: 

* Bad focus 
* Flickers (will need to buy a power stabilizer for the lamps) 
* Dropped my ugly shadow on the set in a few frames
* The puppet was not properly tied resulting in a rather jerky animation 
* Bumped the camera a few times and had to approximately re-align (here the "onion skin" feature of DragonFrame was handy) 
* No plan whatsoever
* No timing
* worked without any dope-sheet resulting in moments like: err... in which direction is that leg is supposed to move, again? 

But god was it fun!

11 comments:

  1. Bah t'es plutôt dur avec toi-même ! Moi je trouve que pour un premier test, c'est drôlement bien ! J'ai vraiment envie d'en voir plus maintenant!
    BIZ Carole

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  2. He's alive!...Well, as alive as a skeleton can be.

    Are you able to create 'key frames' in Dragon and animate the inbetweens? Or is it 'straight ahead' only?

    Nice start though!

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  3. Thanks Carole & Tom for your nice encouragement.
    @Tom: DragonFrame allows you to do pretty much everything... key frames, then shooting in-betweens. I even allows you to lay over guide lines, and curves, tick marks and all sort of very nice animation assisting features. It's an amazing little software. But has you would have guessed, this one test was shot straight, no-chaser... the time for subtleties has not come yet... so many things remaining to be done on the Set and the puppet. I give myself a good 3 month before calling the cast and shoot!

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  4. Nice !

    Joli projet !

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  5. Wow ... All that action in only 4 seconds ...

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  6. @Jon: lol! my wife asked me where I got the inspiration for this couch-potato move... Can't help thinking that she was implying something...

    Saw your render of the Skype model I sent you: nice work. what software did you use? Let me know when you have an improved version with texture and all.

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  7. You are a wonderful person to be doing this, I hope it garners the attention it deserves, best wishes my friend :- )

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  8. @Pixyfrog: XD You can say that about me :) I'm always sitting by the computer doing nothing and dreaming about making the game projects I have in mind true. The difference would be that I'm not married, Too young for that :)
    Though, To be honest, I wasn't talking about Manny seeming like a lazy guy, I was refering to how hard it is to animate.

    Did you? Thanks :) Though I didn't do anything, You modeled it and my CPU did some calculations... I used V-Ray for Sketchup. Will share an improved version ;)

    Oh, And, I don't know if you're on G+ and following Bret Mogilefsky (One of the Grim Fandango Programmers) or not, But if you aren't, I'd be happy to inform you that he's +1'd this post! Congrats :) He likes it!

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  9. YEAAH ! GRIM FANDOGO IS NOT DEAD !
    Bonne chance pour la suite

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  10. @ All, thanks for your nice words! very motivating!

    @Jon, I have just send you another sketchup files... I could really make good use of your Vray for Sketchup render skills. I hope you can help me on this. thanks.

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  11. Je sait seulement dessiner !Chais pas si ca peut t'aider mais tiens moins au jus j'aurais rêver avoir le temps de faire ce projet là !

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