Together at Last

Here are the two characters, Pocahontas and Cornelius, finally together in the same scene. I haven't done the secondary animation yet, hair etc, and I haven't animated the heads yet. The reason is that Jared suggested that create a little personality movie out of these two walking next to each other, giving each other looks etc. So I mocked up the rough storyboard and timing you see below.
So I needed both characters in the scene before I could animate their heads cause I needed to judge where their heads should look. I just got to figure out how to use the trak editor.

On the plus side, they do look quite nice together.

Animation Research and Early Tests

Hello, I have finally started animating. Unfortunately I won't be able to do the personality sequence in time for the deadline but I hope to at least do walkcycles for both characters. Below is some of the research I have done based on those two gorilla walkcycles from YouTube I placed in a previous post.

Here is a video from Youtube aof a gorilla walking from it's side. It's perfect.

I have also looked at a BBC Horizon documentary called "Chimps are People Too?" I was very interesting. Here is a piece of it. Unfortunately, embedding has been disabled so here is a link instead.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2NnqHVBpmQ

Here are some quick thumbnail drawings I have done to figure out the timing. Here are just the keyframe walkcycles for both Pocahontas and Cornelius. I was kinda limited in their walkcycles by their designs.

Update and First Test Animation

Well I finally have some good news. After re-modelling and re-rigging the models, they no longer crumple up when they move. Hooray. As you can see from the rigs below it took some moving around of the joints and adding extra joints in fat areas to take some of the weight strain. Mainly these joints were place on the belly joints, fat wrist twists and the knees, but in Cornelius he also has some on the shoulders as well. There is still some minor paint-weighting to be done but nothing serious like it was before. I like to thank Mike, Alex, Jared, Louisa, Mo and especially Harry for all the help. It has really been appreciated. Finally things are moving.



I have also done some test quadrupedal animation using the 21 frame walk guide on pages 330 and 331 of Richard William's Animators Survival Kit. I tried to download a dog rig from Highend 3D but it didn't work on my Maya 8.5, so I used the bloke rig from CVA 201. Animating the arms was hard as they were FK. Obviously more personality needs to be in the actual walks for the characters but this is a good first try.

Early Test Gorilla Walk

I just done a quick playblast of a Gorilla Walk using Alex's Barry Rig. The right hand doesn't bend to well but this is to just get the poses a timing correct. I followed the tutorial in Richard Williams' Animation Survival Guide. I might need to slow it down when doing it for proper.

What I hope to do with the animation

I hope that I will have rigs that are capable of animating well. I am thinking of doing a few short animation tests, a walk cycle for each character and a short scene showing the characters interacting with each other (no dialogue obviously).

I was thinking for this scene that I could have Pocahontas mimicking Cornelius. Cornelius would be a bit perplexed about this and Pocahontas would be enjoying herself.

I have been thinking about the benchmarks that my work could be marked against. Any good animation and character design could form a good benchmark.

For the Character Design, I was thinking that Chris Sanders (Lilo and Stitch). If my character designs could evoke a child-like wonderment like his did in Lilo and Stitch I would be happy.

(These are taken from the Art of Chris Sanders website)

I also think the character designs of Stephen Silver (Kim Possible, Danny Phantom) are good too. He really uses life drawing well. (Taken from his blog)

Other people I admire are Craig McCracken, Bruce Timm, Chuck Jones and of course Fred Moore, the definative Mickey animator.

I was also thinking about Gromit and any of the character designs in that Tom Bancroft book I already mentioned. I have been using that to help me character design so his work in that should form a good benchmark.

For the animation, any good animation would do as a benchmark. If I could animate as good as Glen Keane does right here, I would be ecstatically happy.




This is an example of top quality animation done in a very short amount of time. Amazing.

Here is another example of just how great Glen Keane is.

Here are some more pencil tests. John Lounsbery, animation of King Louie and a dancing Bugs Bunny by Ken Harris.

Here is Andreas Deja, a great Disney animator, talking about the legend of Disney animation, Frank Thomas.

However, these seam rather lofty goals to reach. I, myself, would be ecstatically happy with a standard similar to the animation coming out of Les Gobelins.

These are the short of benchmarks I am setting for myself. I am not sure I will ever be able to achieve them but I will sure try.