11 Second Club entry by neeters_guy

[neeters_guy]

Another entry for Sept. 2013.

[lwaxana]

Cute ending! And really nice acting. My first reaction was that the voices were so intimate and you have so much subtle facial acting, but the wide shot doesn't support that cinematically. Have you experimented with close up or medium shots for the beginning of the dialog? Obviously you'd still need the long shot at the end to fit the broader acting. But I think it could work well to switch between, although maybe the dialogue is too short and it would be chaotic. Just a thought for something to try. "Storyboarding the Simpsons Way" includes a handy reference on page 13: http://courses.cs.washington.edu/course ... onsway.pdf

[Danimal]

I like the animation, it works well. I had a hard time understanding what they were saying through the accents though, but that's entirely on me, not the cartoon.

[neeters_guy]

Lwaxana, I added a couple tight shots based on your input. It seems to have helped.

My results:



The problem areas noted: Lack of "fv" in the lipsync and the ending.

Thanks for the feedback, guys.

[neeters_guy]

My entry for Oct. 2013.

[Danimal]

Great expressions - looks good!

[neeters_guy]

Thanks, Danimal.

Results for this month's competition:



My scores fall consistently between 4 and 5 stars.

[neeters_guy]

My entry for Nov. 2013.

I thought I would share the sketches that I used to construct my characters. First I do thumbnails to determine the poses and the range of motions needed:


Then I do character sketches, taking note of the joint pivots. I try to maintain the energy of the pencil sketch in final rigged character, but they always seem to lose something in translation.


When I need new hands, I render out a scene, draw them in ArtRage, and import back into AS for tracing:


Here's a wip:


Hope you find this useful. Comments welcome.

[lwaxana]

Love it. You somehow made that obnoxious dialogue seem adorable. Love his smile at the end. And the animation looks excellent. The only suggestion I have for improvement is to scale back the secondary animation in the hair and breasts. It works well as an exercise in animation principles, but the motion draws the eye away from the acting. I think ideally you would want enough counterbalance to be convincing and rich feeling, yet restrained enough that it stays beneath the threshold of awareness (except when the secondary motion is the point of the scene).

Also thanks for sharing your process! What a good idea to mark the pivot points. I will have to try that.

[neeters_guy]

You're right...I'll definitely tone it down for my final upload. I usually do the secondary (drag and follow through) motions last and, in this case, I rushed through it trying to finish it by the weekend.

Thanks for feedback, it really helps.

[Danimal]

As silly as it's going to sound, my favorite part was Bride of Frankenstein's floppy boobs. A subtle touch that made her seem more real.

Nothing can save that awful dialog though.

[ddrake]

Hey, looks really good. What technique are you using for your mouth shapes. The animation looks smoother than some of the earlier posts which seemed to be more an on frame direct switch.

I've just been using a switch layer, interpolating sublayers of essentially a black blob with the same number of points. It was originally meant to be simple on purpose and fit with character style of some of my artwork before I started trying to animate things. I've been trying to decide if I want to step it up with better mouths, but the tests I've made involved masking with groups in a switch layer and my version of AS doesn't seem to interpolate the vector layers if they are in a group together even if each vector shape is using the same number of points.

Really all I'm looking for is a slightly more complex mouth shape involving teeth and tongue that would work with interpolation in a switch layer? Does that make any sense?

To be honest, I've only been working with AS since earlier this year and I haven't toyed around with it some of these things that much. There are probably a lot of things I'm missing about working with masks, and possibly the whole program as well.

Anyway, keep up the good work.

[neeters_guy]

Thanks. Using switches is the easiest way to do lip sync in AS. It actually looks more snappy and cartoony if you use step keys.

In my latest entry, I decided to try a mouth setup similar to djwatermans example: First test of a character. In my case, I have smart bones for "wide-narrow", "open-close", "happy-frown", which cover most mouth shapes. I also have a special bone to articulate the teeth and tongue for phonemes "FV", "TH", "L".

There a lot of ways to manage mouth shapes (Funksmaname has a good one using "shape stacking"), you'll have to experiment to find the method that works best for you.

Addendum:
Here's a file sample with the smart bones actions: Brides Head Revisted


I've intentionally exaggerated the point motions so the smart bones aren't really meant to go to the end, unless you want that effect, of course.

[ddrake]

Thanks. I enjoyed playing around with that rig, and there are some things I may consider incorporating into design of things in the future. The real issue behind this for me is that I've had someone else working on early mouthswitch passes over audio for our project, and from the get-go it seemed best to keep it simple (just a black mouth hole, kinda like old Charlie Brown animations).

But... I'm finding now that I really want some teeth/tongue in the shapes, because, well let's face it, it just looks better that way and obviously does help articulate everything better.

I'm just trying to make a decision on whether to step it up, swap things out, and have it look better in the long run, or keep it simple. It is, for now, a "No Budget" kind of project. And my project partner isn't an artist or animator, so it's definitely more forgiving with timing to have him working with smooth transitions between simple shapes.