I finally finished it. Animation Contest #14’s topic was “Action” and this was my original entry idea. But it quickly surpassed the 500-frame limit, and so I was neither able to finish it on time nor able to enter it. (“Keep it simple.” Heh, I seemed to have missed that.) I planned out and prepared for this animation more than any other that I have yet done. I sketched out the idea, story-boarded it (in a way), drew characters, and then filmed myself doing all the actions as reference footage. If you haven’t filmed yourself doing movements before you animate them, then you have no idea how helpful that is.
Thanks. No I did not use softbodies. I had built this character before the softbody function was widely known about (I think). His stomach is controlled by a simple hook. I’ll take that as a great compliment.
Yeah, it’s a little dark in the tunnel, but that’s the way I wanted it. This is the most I’ve worked on with lights yet. Each light has a cloud textured mapped to it so that it gives off a yellow and orange light.
Glad you think so. You’ve no idea how much time I spent trying to think up what he’d actually find there.
Hmmm, give me a sec to figure out if that comes to a compliment.
I like it! Only one crit: The sword part seems to happen too quickly. Perhaps you could have spent a little more time on that part. Everything else is great and smooth, though.
Heh, that noise was a combination of shoes hitting the inside of a cardboard boxlid that was lightly layered with sand and three celery stalks breaking.
Yes, perhaps that was too fast. I animated the whole thing once, and then threw a bunch of cameras (13, I think) in. So sometimes their “exposures” overlapped each other. I wanted that scene to happen fast, but apparently I made it go a little too fast. (Originally the guy was going to suck in his stomach and the sword would barely miss it, but that didn’t work out the way I wanted it to.)
Check my first reply. The fat man is subsurfed to level 3 (or however you say that) and so his stomach is controlled by a hook, which is parented to the two outermost vertices of his stomach. By the time I had finished this, I was so used to the animation, that I was afraid I had made the belly-bounce too subtle and no one would notice it. Just goes to show how used to your work you can become.
Thanks again for all the replies! I’m glad everyone is enjoying it.
Only one crit: The sword part seems to happen too quickly. Perhaps you could have spent a little more time on that part. Everything else is great and smooth, though.