Help smooth my animation?

[rook]

Hi guys, I'm a bit stuck. I have an animation that I am working on for a film.

The animation has the a series of guns fan out into a wing shape. I have built the wing and animated it but it is still super mechanical.

I want it to be as fluid as possible. I have converted keyframes to Easy ease in and out but it is still very NOT-smooth.

Any ideas?

Here is a still mockup of the image.

And a link to the bumpy animation so you can see what I mean.:

http://vimeo.com/2663700

I can also supply a AE file if anyone wants to tinker. I'm really confused on how to make (not only this) but many of my animations smoother.

Thanks guys.

-rook

 

[j1clark@ucsd.edu]

Hi guys, I'm a bit stuck. I have an animation that I am working on for a film.

The animation has the a series of guns fan out into a wing shape. I have built the wing and animated it but it is still super mechanical.

I want it to be as fluid as possible. I have converted keyframes to Easy ease in and out but it is still very NOT-smooth.

I didn't see any 'bumpy'. I did see what appears to me motion without any 'easing', that is slow start, slow finish, etc. The easing need not be too much but just enough to give it a more 'natural' motion. (even when a car crashes into a brick wall... there's a deacceleration period... )

The other thought would be to add some frame blending to give a bit of 'blur' to the motion, as well as change the shutter angle to give a longer exposure during each frame time.

 

[rook]

Maybe I'm being overly critical but it feels very mechanized and not very fluid. i have added easy easy in (on the starts) and easy ease outs (on the final key frame for each). I have also added motion blur.

I'll add a camera and see if i can mess with shutter angle.....

Thanks for the input.

 

[oneinfiniteloop]

To sell the fluidity the animation should "overextend". If a bird fans out it's feathers, each feather will extend a little past it's final resting place, so to speak. It's the basic principles of squash and stretch.

I put together a little example for you. I created a feathered wing in Illustrator, brought it into AE and set the anchor points using guides, then animated the rotation. Pay attention to the parenting as well. With stuff like this I'll usually parent everything to a master controller null to control global position, scale, and rotation, then sub-parent for local control. In this case, feathers 2-5 are parented to feather 1 which is parented to the master ctrl null.

Look into the graph editor to see what I did with the speed curves. It takes a bit of getting used to it, but you need to learn the graph editor to really take your animation to the next level in AE.

Movie:
http://andrewfallon.tv/mov/feathers.mov

Files (made in CS3):
http://andrewfallon.tv/goodies/smooth_motion.zip

Enjoy, and I hope this helps!

 

[oneinfiniteloop]

Also, I probably could've made the "overextending" a little more pronounced, and done the feather animation with only 2 keyframes for maximum smoothness, but I threw this together quickly and usually use 3 keys anyways to control the overextension easier.

 

[rook]

I totally see what you are saying with the over extension before finding the final position.

That does help sell the move a lot more. I will add that.

Great input. Thanks!!!

 

[luke e]

it looked fine to me.. I think the only bumpiness that you are seeing is the gun stopping instantly. each gun is moving smooth enough it seems, but they just stop so instantly that it makes for a less comfortable animation.