Animating charaters

infokill

infokill

Well-known member
I want to animate a characters limbs that i have illustrated.

Nothing really complicated, for example walking around, lifting arms/legs. very simple movements.
My understanding is that i have the limbs as seperate layers off the body and just keyframe the movements.

Now here are my question.
Timing. Im not looking for the smoothest animation but i want the timing to be on point. Is there a certain technique to timing something like this?

2-Joint movement. Now i dont want the joints to be all jagged looking when i animate the limbs. I've seen some animations that can hide this.

Now if i havent made my self clear at all, here is an example of the kind of animating im trying to do. Its the part with the angel throwing another angel into the sky.

http://www.alexmapar.com/

Thanks!
 
Loop, thanks a bunch. im working on it.

And yeah the reel is amazing.
i came across it on the web.
 
Hey guys, thanks for checking the reel out, i'm glad you liked my work :)
I saw a trickle of visitors to my site from this thread so i thought i'd pop in and say hello.

The icarus project was a fun one, and definitely could have benefited from the puppet tool, though there were alot of other hurdles to deal with than just the inverse and forward ik setups (HD, 30-40 layers per character with morph targets on each major limb joint, fine detail like wind in hair and feathers, each character 2k tall, and a struggling workstation!)

I set the lower torso as the IK chain parent to the adjacent body parts and so on. Each body part layer had the 'behind bits" painted up and isolated in photoshop and then brought in. Overlapping bits as joints bent were dealt with combination of animated mask hides and morphing. Reloading layers was a pain in the arse with the composition/croppd layers import settings and all in all i found myself recalibrating the position and morph anchors of each layer too often.

Little 2ndary motion morphs like breathing chests, flexing muscles and wind through hair helped pull it off.

I keep saying morph out of habit, but in actuallity it was a combination of the various distortion filters in AE. Morph targets refer to the distortion grid shape targets.

fun project, and theres a few other shots that will eventually get put up in that gallery for you to check out too. The forward IK when icarus grabs the sun was painful to deal with to say the least!

Cheers!
Alex
 
Fantastic work Alex. Really fantastic.

Also, thanks for coming aboard to help explain a bit. It doesn't make a whole lotta sense to me (as I'm new to AE), but looks like a great help for infokill to get his project going.

-brown
 
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