Tuesday, June 04, 2013

Back to the basics...



Not as beautiful as Marty's wonderful marker painting, but I thought I'd show off a test I just finished. This is a simple walk cycle made in Blender. I used Daniel Martinez Lara's free 'Red Nelb' model that was already rigged and ready to go. Mainly learning Blender's animation workflow (dopesheet and graph editor), but I also played with the Freestyle Renderer which gave me a fairly calligraphic inking effect on top of the main render. I like the result. I mentioned a few months ago I might want to render frames out and ink on top of them in ToonBoom, but I think this rendering style combined with the ability to have animated sculpture via Blender's Shape Key functionality might give me largely what I was wanting without all the additional work.

8 comments:

Davis Chino said...

Ronnie! This looks like a really good start. I dig the insouciance.

Maybe your body "hit" on each foot strike could be softened just a wee bit...? That or get a little more overlap to soften it (tho' you don't want to go overboard on that kinda thing).

On yr next walk cycle you might play with rotating the pelvis--either side-to-side or fore-aft (I'd pick one or the other for starters, tho' ultimately you'll want to be able to do both).

Looking good! We're counting on you to develop some cool animations to make this blog look pro!!

Davis Chino said...

Oh, and thank you for the very kind words! That made my day!

MrGoodson2 said...

I think this Blender direction is a good thing.
Nice walk cycle. I do think there is a hard heel hit. Kind of the way I walk if you go by my shakey cam videography.

Surly Bird said...

I'll back off on the 'down' position. Definitely needs some pelvic rotation. Spinal action is MIA, too (although I don't want to overdo it). Overall, he's definitely too wooden (arms in particular). Thanks for the constructive crits and suggestions, Marty!

Still learning the ins-and-outs of Blender, but I can say it's a very well thought-out system. Some great tools there and there are some built in nice touches to this rig (bendy limbs, for instance) that are really nice.

Surly Bird said...

Thanks, Ellis. I'm going by the Richard Williams five-stage-per-strike walk cycle ('contact - passing postion -contact' with the 'down' after the first contact and the 'up' after the passing position) method.

MrGoodson2 said...

Good book. I used to own it. Beata's brother shared this with me. Funny 3D insider gags. I also sent it to Carlo, Marty.
Vimeo Animation Tutorial

Davis Chino said...

Ronnie, I really like that you're starting this way, without the pelvis stuff. Get this looking good (which means training yr eye to see this stuff), and then you'll have a lot easier time when you start animating the pelvis--in a new walk cycle!

And don't forget--walks can be funny. Geez, I remember standing in line at Office Depot and they were trying to sell TV's...they had some classic Looney Tunes playing--a Tweety and Sylvester cartoon. And they had this totally incidental tennis player do a walk on--and he had the funniest bounding walk. I copied it for a Jessie (Toy Story) walk cycle, and it came out pretty lively (tho' it had a hitch in the cycle I never did remove).

Rickart said...

Keep up the good work, sir! We need to have you guys over for a hot tub soak! It's the end of the school year right now, so things are pretty crazy at the moment, but perhaps in July we can have you over.