First animation - Stick Monkey

MattVG · Post by **MattVG** » Mon Dec 04, 2006 6:04 pm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e824uZIGe8E

My first animation with Anime Studio. Just messing around to acquaint myself with AS and reacquaint myself with animation. I was going to finish it but it bores me now so I'll probably move on to more exciting things... We'll see

jahnocli · Post by **jahnocli** » Mon Dec 04, 2006 6:28 pm

...some nice movement there...

artfx · Post by **artfx** » Mon Dec 04, 2006 6:39 pm

Yes. That has life to it. Very cool work.

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Mon Dec 04, 2006 6:40 pm

That is pretty good. Look forward to your next submission.

Rasheed · Post by **Rasheed** » Mon Dec 04, 2006 9:24 pm

Can't wait to see the finished animation

ulrik · Post by **ulrik** » Mon Dec 04, 2006 9:41 pm

That's a really living ape, nice movements!

Genete · Post by **Genete** » Mon Dec 04, 2006 10:00 pm

Cool animation!!. I Love bone dinamics for monkey tail!!
Background is also interesting.

DVTVFilm · Post by **DVTVFilm** » Mon Dec 04, 2006 10:56 pm

Excellent. Keep going. I'd like to see more.

MattVG · Post by **MattVG** » Mon Dec 04, 2006 11:31 pm

Thanks everyone. About two seconds into the animation I found a better way to rig my character but I didn't know how to add new bones and reparent bones without messing up my existing animation. Is there a way to change the skeleton without messing everything up?

The rig I'm using in this animation is a headache.

dreeko13 · Post by **dreeko13** » Mon Dec 04, 2006 11:59 pm

why not duplicate the layers you need and and hide the original layers while you alter the copies so you have the original as a back up and an instant comparison when needed

Rasheed · Post by **Rasheed** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 12:34 pm

What many people seem to do is create several versions of the same characters (e.g. from different view angles) and either use layer visibility or put them all in a switch layer. Another solution would be to create a new document file and import the character into that. This is handy when your character stays the same, but the surroundings are different in the next scene.

If you start from scratch is well worth investing time in setting up actions. These are little segments of animation that occur more than once in your movie. You simply drop in an action, and AS will put the correct keys in the timeline. If you take care what parts of the character your actions are working on, you can even combine actions. Now you can concentrate on perfecting those actions (they can be edited) before you start dropping them in. The advantage seems to be that your actions are more consistent and speed up animation considerably.

In general, successful workflows for creating animation with AS seem to involve lots of time in preparation, and relatively little time in actually animating.

Just some ideas for you to work on.

MattVG · Post by **MattVG** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 2:48 pm

Thanks for the ideas, however I do not yet have AS Pro so I don't think I can just swap around animations as you suggested Rasheed. I can however swap my current character for my latest and just animate the rest with him.

Mikdog · Post by **Mikdog** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 11:04 pm

Awesome, I dig it.