What the...Smiley Guy has a daughter?? *Challenge included*

[mtbuck24]

First off I want to say awesome job ddrake I love how you are doing that as is, still shows I have a long way to go! I personally love all the emotions that you put into your characters, you're really good at that. I'm sorry I know that rig is pretty much crap to work with. It's mostly because it's from the smiley guy rig which was a lot different in shape and size (reason why the head turn doesn't work).

I can't get more then one smart bone to work together...do you know how to do that? Heyvern helped me with it a while back ago, but I don't know if I get the same results as him. Mine still comes out distorted.

I totally forgot to add the audio in the file I will do that.

Other than that I still think you turned the poop you had to work with into something good. I liked it! I know with experience I will get better, but I'm not even satisfied with my work yet.

-mtbuck24

[mtbuck24]

Cool Danimal do you have any animations that I can look at to see how you use switch layers?? I used switch layers before but really like that exaggerated look of cartoon, and because I suck with realism....that's pretty much why I draw cartoons. haha.

I will definitely keep it in mind.

- mtbuck24

[ddrake]

Ok, so I couldn't help but come back and try to at least finish a full version of this. Here's the full clip, still using the initial rig. I made no changes to any of the existing bones, except I cleared your head turn keys and re-did them. Then I added a pupil move and dilate bones for a little variety.



I could probably play around with this for hours, maybe trimming back some overall movement and highlighting specific poses, but I should probably move along. While far from perfect I think this does show well enough that your rigging setup is pretty functional even without a lot of changes.

A rule of thumb I follow with trying to work with head turns is to try to move the shapes with as few individual point adjustments as possible and keep things very linear. That is: for side to side turn - pull the eyes, mouth, brows, whatever directly on the x-axis and scale width. And up/down turns, pull entire shapes along the y-axis. Obviously with more complex characters you have some other issues to contend with, but the simpler you can keep the position adjustments, the better things will look overall. For the round shaped character it was unnecessary to have a multi-framed action for the smartbone turn actions. Zero frame and frame 1 in the final position seemed to work well enough.

Anywhoo, that's my offering, I should probably step back and let others critique or offer up their own interpretation.
(and probably get back to my own work )

[mtbuck24]

OH MY GOSH YOU KILLED IT!!! THAT WAS AWESOME! Holy crap...it's yours take it...I can't do it anymore..I can't animate...I'm not worthy...jk. I haven't even read what you wrote just saw the animation...dude...Freaking awesome..I am just geeking out right now!

Read the rest thank you for telling me about the head turn..I am struggling with that a lot for some reason. You made things 10X easier for me. Again awesome job! You should totally put that on it's own separate post. I think you will get a lot of good feedback!

Question: So you only use one frame for the head turn?? Man that is cool! It looks soo smooth. But what do you do for head turns and you want to hide the bow behind the head?

[ddrake]

Question: So you only use one frame for the head turn?? Man that is cool! It looks soo smooth. But what do you do for head turns and you want to hide the bow behind the head?

Thank you

As far as doing any convincing depth alterations, the smartbone action will almost surely need multiple frames. But I think I've had decent success with head turns by trying to start off simple and shooting for just 2 keyframes with the main features, and then dealing with the "accessories" as they come up. Of course if there's something you know you need to have shift behind a shape during a turn, I wouldn't just do the extremes on frame 0 and frame 1, (you'll just have to adjust everything later...) But you can give yourself maybe a quick 24 frame window and focus on the simple but main components first. (If it's an already fully designed character, I'd just hide the other layers) Then get something that looks decently smooth from all angles with just the face first, using just the initial frame and end frame. Then start tackling the other elements.

So much of art and animation is about leading the viewers eye, so if the face movement is solid and looks smooth, you're much less likely to notice a sudden pop of a point, an unrealistic shape turn, or a frame to frame depth change.

I think heyvern might have mentioned this as well, but you can always activate one smart bone action to its extreme position while you're working on another action to make sure the adjustments don't overpower, or over extend each other. Just make sure to reset the other bone's rotation from the action when you're done or that bone-rotation will try to become a part of your current smartbone action.