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Finally got an actual animation to work. It is just a simple short character turnaround, but after so much time it does feel like a small accomplishment. Now I know how to turn the frames into animations, so that is a step forward.
So this is a rough storyboard of a sequence from the digital story which tries out the closed captioning technique for dialogue, which I am not sure about yet. There are still many questions in my mind about how to do the dialogue.
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Welcome to the community!
This seems like an ambitious project. I think you are right to storyboard and plan it like this.
Did you have plans on how you intend to animate the characters? Animating that much content manually is going to be a massive job, unless you have a team to help (or can do motion capture).
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It is a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for looking at my work in progress and assessing the situation so accurately.
You are correct in that the project is a bit ambitious for just me. I have lots of stories and characters drawn out in sketchbooks from the last few decades, so it was very tempting to try to create the little worlds that I sketched and wrote about into 3D characters and scenes. I really enjoy making them, and so I have spent the last few years making what I could with Blender. Now there are many 3D characters and sets, some better than others. I still have lots more to learn though. There are many things that I still do not know. Eventually, I hope to at least know how to properly create my project. Then at that point, I will have to pick and choose which creations to animate fully, and which scenes will only become storyboards at best due to time constraints. It is a funny thing to realize that one can only realistically create a portion of that which one aspires to, but such is the nature of life.
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I am now trying to figure out which character designs seem more interesting to other people. A little slideshow seemed like an easy way to show some characters for comparisons. With so many possible directions to go in, it does seem prudent to ask people if they have any preferences between characters, because that could help me to prioritize different stories moving forward.
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These characters are overall consistent enough in their design that they could all be part of the same story, and it would create a nice level of variety.
The one thing I see that’s really different between them is the way the hair is made. Some of the characters have thicker, more stylized hair designs and some have finer, more realistic hair. This is mostly a matter of preference, but I think the more realistic, finer hair, works better in this context. The colored skin in combination with the thick strands makes is so the viewers might interpret those characters as aliens with tentacles / fleshy tubes instead of hair (unless that’s what it’s actually supposed to be?).
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Thank you for looking at the characters and for giving an honest opinion about your preference. Honest preferences from people are really important to hear in long term projects like this. I suspect that many people will probably prefer the look of the finer hairstyle characters to the overly simplified hairstyle characters, because they do look a bit more refined somehow. It is really good to hear how stuff visually reads to others. Knowing which characters are more likely to be visually interesting to viewers is a pretty good thing to know, especially at this stage. Thank you for the feedback, as it is much appreciated.
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I put a few images of various characters up on a few sites to see which images got the most attention. It seemed like a simple way to do market research on the likability of the character designs, although certainly not very scientific. Animating is so time consuming that it really does seem wise to know which characters are likely to be most appreciated by others before I commit to any extremely lengthy workflows. Oddly enough, this character design seems to consistently get the most clicks, so that was good to find out. I would not have expected that result. Now I can focus a little more on the story elements relating to her specifically and move forward a little more confidently while I learn a lot about animation. I still have lots to learn, but these next steps should be fun.
I am slowly learning how to animate. There is definitely a lot left to learn before I can really complete whole scenes. This is just a very simple walk cycle, but you have to start somewhere. With lots more practice, I bet I can get there eventually.
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I’m curious, are you following any animation tutorial? Animation for sure needs some source of quality knowledge to learn the correct way.
The movements you have here are a good start, though there are additional movements that could be added to make it better (especially the pelvis, which could use some up-down movement as well as some rotations).
Keep up the good work, animation is a challenging topic to learn!
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Thank you for looking, and for your helpful suggestions. Animation is very complicated, as I am definitely finding out. I agree that animation is a challenging topic to learn!
I have been watching a few tutorials, trying to figure walk cycles out, and I expect to watch quite a few more. There is a lot to learn still, and much more practice is needed, but it is a fun subject to study.
I agree with you that I can aim for better results in the future. I will definitely try to figure out how to make the adjustments that you suggest, as I suspect that it would really help. Thank you for the encouragement and wise counsel.
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When searching for animation tutorials, the end result of the tutorial should be a good way to judge the quality of the information.
If I have any suggestion to make, I would recommend not to limit yourself to Blender tutorials. Blender is strong and popular for modeling but has relatively few competent animators compared with other software. If you stumble on an animation tutorial that’s made in ex. Maya, you will be able to get good info out of it (as long as you master the technical side of Blender’s anim curves), because the artistic aspect is the same.
Finally, don’t hesitate to film yourself do the action (or find existing videos of it) as reference for the poses and timing. It’s pretty much the standard procedure in the industry and it makes a big difference for the quality of the end result.
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That is very helpful advice, as I never even thought to look at any tutorials that were not strictly for Blender. Since tutorials in Maya would be a benefit for animating, then I will certainly look at some of those from now on as well.
Filming myself is also a very good idea. I had not thought of that. Finding out that it is an industry standard makes it seem like absolutely the right choice for moving forward.
Thank you so much! You have helped me a lot with your great suggestions!
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