Animated pre-columbian ceramics

[Víctor Paredes]

Hi, I want to share some animations of a project I participated in.
It's about american cultures (I mean all América). Most of them are made with american art pieces animated with Anime Studio by different people.


I participated on "Sapo feo" (I made all the 2d characters, except the girl and his dad) and on another one which is not on the page right now.
People of my office made "El secreto".

I hope you like it.

http://www.ojitos.cl/tikitiklip_precolombino.php

[patricia3d]

I am watching Sapo Feo
Its great move. Completely looking like 3D and the girl is the same her face you have uploaded in the forum.
Great andimation. River Part and Rain is Great.

[Víctor Paredes]

I am watching Sapo Feo
Its great move. Completely looking like 3D and the girl is the same her face you have uploaded in the forum.
Great andimation. River Part and Rain is Great.

Thanks, kkrawal. Hehe, actually the girl I posted here was my proposal for this project. It was totally vectorial, but as it had to be animated by several people and some animations were already made in that moment, they decided to keep her as bitmaps. Maybe in another opportunity
Anyway, I didn't animate the Sapo feo introduction (the girl and her father). I don't know who was, but (and this will be our secret) I didn't like it too much, to be frank.

[slowtiger]

Aaah! Of course that intro part is not yours, just watch the walk ...

The girl design is very nice, albeit with a bit too much contrast? But definitely something you can work with, in bitmaps. Looks very much like an old-fashioned children's book.

The frogs were a bit dark and hard to read IMO. I guess you had to work with a limited number of photographs? It's always better if you have the chance to do the photographs yourself, because then you could use a better lighting for your purpose.

I found the movements a bit too smooth - after all, it's a style where all elements are clearly cut out from some source, so I think a more jerky animation, more cutout-like, may have been better.

Also the photographed elements in the BGs didn't work all the time. The flat parts outside were OK, but the inside of the temple didn't work to me. I wonder if this is just my personal taste, but I'd liked it to be more 2D.

The rain is great! Very much child-like, but impressive. How many variations of the drop did you create? (This is one of the rare occasions where I'd like to be able to script particles, like having a random range for the drop's colour.)

Overall a nice piece of work, as usual.

[Víctor Paredes]

Thank you for the kind comments, slowtiger. I have to clear something, I only made the 2d animation of the videoclip 2d characters, the composition was made by guy I only saw once, when I gave him a DVD with the render with alpha of each character's scene. This was almost a year ago.
I never had seen the final composition until yesterday. But that is my own fault. When I joined the project it was all running, characters where cut in parts in psd files, backgrounds, animatic, song, etc. were already designed.
I agree with you in many aspects, but actually I'm very happy with the final composition. It can have some overall designing faults, but I feel it was made carefully, which is not too much common here in Chile, more in very low budget projects like this, you can check some other videos of the same project in order to understand what I say.
One of the biggest problems animating this clip was the size and complexity of the rigs. My computer is very slow and I created rigs with several bones to keep joints clean. I practically had to animate it in blindness, only seeing the construction curves, it was impossible to move anything in other way. Each couple minutes I had to render a preview to see what was going on. I really felt like in 1992. This velocity plus the constant corrections and changes made this project very like a nightmare. This was one of the reasons I never took the time to go watch the final composition before.

This videos are made in full HD. I hope to post that version once the project be showed on TV.


PD: Here is the anme file of one character, if someone wants to take a look
http://www.mediafire.com/?5t948p65a4d5bh8