Clawing into animation

More tests, this time taking a shot from the animatic and testing the movement of the bear in relation to his surroundings, in this case, his house.
The style wasn't quite pinned down when this sequence was created so I tested scribbly shadows instead of  more perfect 'Disneyesque' shading.
It's now been decided to do the line-work in TV paint and the colour in photoshop in order to get the sketchy feel the director wanted so any tests after this will most likely only show line-work.

Picture taken from animatic

One is with the outline, the other without so I could see how the scribbles affected the shape of the bear and whether going without an outline would make it difficult to see arms etc.

 

Dapper meerkats and spiffing giraffes

An update on The Bird project called for character designs of a meerkat, giraffe and hippo to be dressed in human clothing to portray a sort of dream sequence Tilly goes through as she day-dreams about returning home to Africa.
So far only the meerkat and giraffe have designs as I wait to hear back about the design for the mother to be approved, as she will be the hippo so I require the design of her dress.

Unfortunately after meeting with the team, the director suddenly realised the meerkat is in fact supposed to be the maid in the story so the lovely dapper gentleman of a meerkat needed to have his gender switched to female. Procedure went according to plan.

There was also a discussion in the weekly about altering the movement of the zebra herd slightly as they all moved the same which felt noticeable to the others. Obviously the issue was how to alter the movement seeing as live action footage depicted zebra's galloping together in the same way anyway so I opted to move legs in the cycle slightly for a few of them and change the way the head moves to depict the illusion they were all done differently. However factoring in how long the sequence is visible for in relation to the animatic isn't very long, roughly 3 or 4 seconds with a camera zoom so spending too much time on this sequence is better spent in the more detailed character scenes.

Hooves, Trunks and Claws

I've been working further into 'The Bird' by developing an elephant walk for another of the African scenes alongside altering some of the animation on the zebra as there wasn't enough variation in each zebra for the viewer to not notice they were similar.
Below are the results of the zebra, I've not done much to the actual movement as all zebras move the same in terms of gait, so I've altered the head movement of a few and changed stripe design.

I found the elephants easier to animate, probably because they don't exhibit the same flurry of legs the zebra does and they move at a slower rate. Below are two cycles, one of an adult elephant, another is a baby with the baby completing a cycle faster than the adult because there's the obvious factoring in weight and size in comparison.

And then for Claws for Concern I coloured the bear to see how he would fit into the background and after the weekly feedback session I was asked to remove the outlines completely as the background itself doesn't have any outline work so the other experiment is to see if no outline can work. TV paint didn't totally remove the outline however from what was achieved with a faint outline it didn't look too bad as the issue was removing the outline would cause the arm and legs to become lost within the body.

Before I removed the outline from the entire animation, I did a test image, one was completely removed, the other I swapped outline colour so a dark grey outline accompanied the light grey body and the light grey outline went with the dark grey shadows. I felt toning the black outline down might look less detracting and bold but it didn't make much difference.

The shadows were also redone in the test below as it was mentioned in the feedback session I didn't quite get the lighting correct in terms of where the bear was in the background.

Claws For Concern

Also began working on 'Claws For Concern' by doing small animation tests for the bear. This bear walks on fours and twos so below I've done a walk test of the bear standing up walking, with an all fours test coming soon.
I did begin a run cycle on all fours but it looks slightly too mechanical when looking at the head, possibly needs a bit more movement to look more natural.

Zebra are 'a' running

Finished a small herd of galloping zebra with just two variations of stripe design, just so it doesn't look like an obvious copy and paste job.
Eyes are empty at the moment just because I'm waiting for the background so I can see where the light is coming from in relation to where the reflection is going to go in the eyes.

Also renewed the original zebra designs I posted after altering the shape to suit the animation. This version is slightly stockier in keeping with the real life version of the animal.

Finally....

Horses are hard.........zebras are probably one of the WORST and most challenging animals to animate. Since the previous post, I went back and redid the zebra following some live action footage as close as possible before tweaking the legs and back to suit the requirements of the film. It's turned out so much better than any of the previous tests and gallops a lot smoother.

The reason I say zebras are one of the worst animals for animation is the one thing horses don't have, which is stripes. What sucks away time isn't the fact you have to draw on the stripes of ten frames of zebra, that's easy, it's what the movement looks like when you've put all the stripes on and this is the difference between stripes that look like they move with the zebra and stripes that literally look like they have a mind of their own. A lot of R & D for me has been in this section, trying to work out how to make the stripes move with the zebra without making it look like a jittering mess of lines. I tried drawing stripes on one frame then copying and pasting the same stripes onto the other nine frames and just moving them into the places they'd be in relation to the position of the zebra but this looked like the stripes weren't connected to the zebra and didn't reflect muscle movement in the way I wanted to. I also tried keeping the stripes static to minimise any eye confusion but had the same effect. The option I had left was drawing the stripes manually by following the movement of the zebra and disregarding stripe shape, allowing them to change between frames. Although there was some improvement, the irregular shapes caused too much jitter which would put people off looking at the zebra for too long. So for the finished product below, I had to compromise between the two, limiting the stripes movement and keeping them at a similar shape, but allowing them to change. This I did by copying and pasting like I did in trial 1 but tracing over the stripes for each frame when they were in the correct place to make it a bit more natural than mechanical.

Next job is making a herd, and for most studios, it's a simple duplication and offsetting the cycles which I've done below but on playing it back, I may vary stripe shapes on a few zebra just so it looks less like a copy and paste job

Fleshing out

Now that the initial skeletal structure has been mapped out and approved, I've then proceeded to add the muscles, mane, tail and ears. Although the skeleton looked fine I did have to tweak the legs slightly on some frames as I discovered joints were too short in proportion to the figure. Unlike my first animation test, I've animated the ears flopping back and forth in accordance with the gallop motion to put a bit more character into the animal. One note to point out is the head looks slightly too mechanical, as in to say, it doesn't look like the head was re-drawn twelve times for the twelve frames which is what makes a 2D animation look more natural. This is because the head was copied and pasted twelve times and just rotated into the correct position each time. This is deliberate, not accidental because I've found in the past my horse heads increase and decrease in size as it cycles through an animation. It's just a basic guide so when I go to put the final line work over the top, I'm following the same size head each time and won't have to go back and re-size frames later on.
Next up: stripe mechanics.