red vs blue (fight animation) [brighter]

[zdk1]

[edit: added screenshot]
[edit2: birghter version, different camera angle, slightly tweaked animation]
Nope, nothing to do the with the Halo machinima spoof .

still continuing the animation focusing on physical movement.

A fight scene was suggested in the last thread so I decided to give that another shot. It came out much better than my other fighting scenes (such as the ones in the "breaking in" short). There are a couple things that bug me but i'm not quite sure what. There is one small floating foot mistake that I only caught after the render with shadows, but its not big and I'll fix it soon.



~2mb
www.princeton.edu/~ddkim/anims/redvblue.mov

still a bit short but meatier than the last installment. (the next animation will not have any martial arts/fighting I promise)

I've noticed that I can animate much faster now, which is pretty sweet. practice does help heh.

In addition to C&C, I'm also open to suggestions as to what to animate next (still focusing on movement of the entire body).


[brighter version here: www.princeton.edu/~ddkim/anims/rvb.mov]

[geronimo]

please do something with the lightning ^^ I can't see enough :>

[zdk1]

hmmm, it looks fine on my screen. I'm not going to re-render just yet but here's and animatic version of the same animation. If this doesn't show up then I think something may be wrong on your end.

http://www.princeton.edu/~ddkim/anim...ueanimatic.mov

[DeeVad]

great to follow your work on animatic, I really like your work.

[zdk1]

thanks for the compliment DeeVad, and also for commenting on the preivous thread.

I added a screenshot to the first post as well.

[argunda]

neat! really smooth animation. do you attend Princeton? :P

[zdk1]

thanks! yes I go to princeton, just finished my freshman year and I'm probably going to major in computer science. could be doing better gradewise....heh....came pretty close to failing a math course for the first time in my life. feels like starting from scratch again knowledge wise.
Strange, in high school I got up at 6:00 and was at school around 7:00 but now I can't for the life of me get to any class that starts before 10:00.


anyways, its at the bottom of the first post now but, I tweaked the animation slightly (minor changes and a different camera angle). More illumination this time.

www.princeton.edu/~ddkim/anims/rvb.mov

[Edeehem]

A very nice and fluid animation you've got there! Great work so far.
Only crit is the first kick from the blue guy and when the red catches it, he bends his shin in an impossible way (he would litteraly break his knee joint if he twisted his shin that way). You should put more emphasis on blue's low kick that trips Red. I didnt see it the first time and wondered how Red fell down.

[PolygoneUK]

Gonna start by saying that I like how your style is progressing.

I checked out your other thread with the break-in, as well. I'd like to ask whether you might possibly find the time between your studies, to create a video tutorial showing how you layout some basic moves.

Reason I ask is that I've found it very difficult to find any decent tutorials which cover good character movement... with the exception of what Jeff Lew has to offer. (But I can't afford his DVD).

I often see character animations like your own, and wonder "how do they do that". Because when I try character movement, it's just plain awful. I can rig no problem, but that's useless if they can't be animated half decently.

If you can't do a video tutorial, do you have any other links of your own that could be of use to us wannabes.

[Hazard]

Fantastic!

[argunda]

Originally Posted by zdk1 thanks! yes I go to princeton, just finished my freshman year and I'm probably going to major in computer science. could be doing better gradewise....heh....came pretty close to failing a math course for the first time in my life. feels like starting from scratch again knowledge wise. Strange, in high school I got up at 6:00 and was at school around 7:00 but now I can't for the life of me get to any class that starts before 10:00. anyways, its at the bottom of the first post now but, I tweaked the animation slightly (minor changes and a different camera angle). More illumination this time. www.princeton.edu/~ddkim/anims/rvb.mov

found another problem. sometimes the people go through the floor

[PolygoneUK]

Originally Posted by argunda found another problem. sometimes the people go through the floor

You're not viewing it right. That's no ordinary floor... that's a highly unstable atomic-phase-shifting-ground-plane.

But yeah, couple of "HELP!!!, I'm in quicksand" moments.

[zdk1]

Hi, thanks for the feedback!

Slepnyrl:
Those are good points, thanks for pointing them out.
I agree that blue's sweep kick is probably the weakest move in the animation. It suffers from kind of popping out of nowhere and not have much anticipation/followthrough (also, the camera is in a bad place to see it well, it actually looks more passable from the other side). Should have allotted more frames for the setup there but I didn't want to retime a bunch of other motions. (also known as lazyness)
The shin was actually worse before. For some reason my rig doesn't want to bend the leg the way I want for those few frames. bending the hip more would do it but then his leg goes through red's body so he'd need to hold the leg further away.

argunda: heh, I had made peace with red's elbows dipping into the ground for a frame, but that blue nearly dissapears into the ground at one point. It's not really noticeable from the first set of camera angles, but in the updated its pretty apparent.


PolygoneUK: hah! sure, why not . I'll watch out for that more in the future.

As for a possible videotutorial or something similar. I think I'd want a little more experience and a wider breadth of animations before I start spewing off things that other people might potentially listen to.
In the meantime, I might have mentioned these at some point in the past but I'll post a few websites that have helped (and do help) me a lot

www.keithlango.com is a good one. see the tutorials section.
www.spicycricket.com had some awesome tutorials/articles but has returned errors for about a year now so no dice unfortunately.

on a side note. trying to have a character getting up from lying on they're back and not having it look like they're floating upwards is a lot harder than I thought :P

[Sorth]

hi, have you ever heard of endorphin? http://www.naturalmotion.com/pages/products.htm
If not, its now your favorite program for physics.
free for personal use.
heres some demo's, http://www.naturalmotion.com/pages/demos.htm
It probably looks a bit hard but its really not(not in a bad way. This thing is very accurate with physics and can do some cool stuff).

[xrqlz]

WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW. How is this possible? Is there any chance that I could see the character's armature for this? I've tried rigging some simple characters before, but it's always turned out crappily. All I ever really wanted to do with animation is make a hundred stick people fight it out.

XrQLz

[zdk1]

Sorth:

it seems like an interesting and potentially useful program. I don't see anywhere on the site though where it says free for personal use, just a student edition for 1k+. Price aside, I'd want to learn how to animate first, before starting to automate parts of the process.

xrqlz:
thanks! The armature is fairly simple and straightforward as rigs go




and and unposed version in octohedron mode:




I built this one, but I would be remiss in not mentioning harkyman's old full body rig that he posted here some time ago, since this takes after it in most aspects. A few minor differences, and a bit simplified, (ie: harkyman's rig had articulated feet and hands, and lock controls for the knee and elbow joints). Its pretty much a fully IK rig, including the spine. I guess FK spines may look more natural, but IK is much faster for me to work with and get the results I want. I chose to not have extra knee and elbow lock constraints b/c I just feel that its simpler and easier to control the roll by directly rotating the bones in the ik chain, though I'm sure there are people who disagree with me there.

No frills and complicated constraints on this one. A very fast and responsive rig though. I have a bit of learning to do before I try and rig an organic character that deforms nicely. Hope that helped a little bit. A little bit of advice though, I would start smaller than a 100 person fight scene. I suppose this is related to the xiaoxiao stick figure fighting animations? If so, those are awesome animations and were pretty influential to me.