acrobatics animations (revised)

[zdk1]

[edit: tweaks made to the acro animation, same download locations]

Hi, these were originally supposed to go in the Focused forum but there wasn't too much response there. I figure at least I'll get a few more comments here and more people will see it.

These are the two acrobatics animations I have posted so far. This first is the shortest, a single cartwheel with idle and recovery animation. I have updated this slightly since but not rendered the new one yet.

~1 MB
www.princeton.edu/~ddkim/anims/cartwheel.mov


The second is the longer one, which I spent significantly more effort on. The beginning is the same, copied with minor changes from the cartwheel.

Instead of a cartwheel, he does some other moves which I'll let you see. For critiques, I think there's still trouble on the landing into a handstand and the jumping from the ledge. any critiques there (or anywhere) would be appreciated. There's also a small knee pop I know about. I'll fix and rerender soon. Its not that noticable and I wanted to get this out and get feedback on the rest.

camera follows character ~2.6MB:
www.princeton.edu/~ddkim/anims/acrocam.mov

front view (animatic) ~1.4MB:
www.princeton.edu/~ddkim/anims/acrofront.mov

side view (animatic) ~1.3MB:
www.princeton.edu/~ddkim/anims/acroside.mov

Oh, and just to get it off my chest....animating the arms is now officially the bane of my existence. aarrghhh!!!!!! They have to be babied pretty much frame by frame throughout the entire thing (well, a lot of things were nearly frame by frame but the arms were the most frustrating) and they still don't look good in a bunch of parts.....

[VividHazE]

They should have hired you for Elephants Dream.

I'm very impressed with your animations, as even though I'm simply a lowly beginner in Blender, complex character animation such as kung-fu sequences and acrobatics are a personal goal of mine, and really why I'm learning 3D. So seeing your work, made in Blender, was very enjoyable.

I love your attention to detail in the small motions of balance and inertia etc. I can tell you know what your doing. How long did it take you to do the animation sequences?

Since your leagues ahead of me in this department I really can't critique your work, but I will say I'm sad to see this in the Finished section. I would love to see more!

[zdk1]

Hi, I have updated the acro animation (the second, longer one), the links are the same so you can get them from the first post. Got rid of two popping issues and tweaked the animation in a bunch of places (the flip looks better IMO as before it spontaneosly gained an incredible amount of momentum halfway through which looked odd (took me a while to figure out why it looked off).


VividHazE:
thanks for checking out the animation and for your kind words. you may also want to glance at the tweaked one.

good luck with your animation goals. Martial arts/acrobatic animations were always a huge draw to me as well. Even my first character animations were about forms/fighting (most of them). I think I posted some of those here under "block dude animation" or something similar. Not sure if the vids are still online though as that was a different host.

the cartwheel animation was done in one night (by "night" I mean something like 11:30 - 5:00 in the morning, my sleep schedule is still royally messed up)
the acro animation was about two and a half "nights".
A good bit of time but much faster than it would have been to animate something similar even a month ago.

I imagine there will be more animations in a similar vein. My original plan was to put them all in an ongoing thread in Focused Critiques. Sorry to those that gave me crits in that other thread. I know I didn't give it much chance before I moved it over here. It is appropriate that they're now in Finished though since I'm pretty sure I won't be revising them again.