3D Animals in Motion : January 2014

30.1.14

Horse Stepped

My progress with the stepping. Just need to add more frames then I'm onto linear.

Some linear

24.1.14

Blocking

I'll post my blocking progress here for the horse animation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyJksD2P_fE

This is before the horse walks forward.

Grease pencil to mark out the walk cycle, I did it without but got confused near the end, so I went over it when the pencil to see where I went wrong. It helped a lot.

Back to the horse walk cycle

I will be going back to continue with the horse walk cycle, although I think I will start again and have the horse move it's head like I have in the sketches before I animate the walk cycle. The current one I have makes it look like it's sliding. But it's a learning curve from all the horse walk cycles I've attempted.

Finished Eagle flying animation

I have finished the eagle animation, and thought it would look nicer to add a sky background and add the textures that came with the model.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYHipoTp4M8

There are a few more tweaks I would've liked to have done, like animating individual feathers for wind movement, but I needed to get this done so I can move onto another animation. If I have time at the end, I will go back to this. Overall I'm really pleased with how this turned out and enjoyed animating wings a lot!

22.1.14

Most recent progress

And this is where I have got to now.

Next I will animate the feet to give it more of a natural feel and move the whole of the body to make it feel there is wind.

Lastly I will look at animating the individual feathers to make it look like there is some wind. I don't know how that will look.

And I will want to add a sky background and add the textures and material to make it look better.

Progress so far

I decided to go back to the slower flapping version as it felt easier to animate in.

After I was satisfied with the wing flaps, I started with the up and down movement of the body. (blogger does not want to properly link these for some reason)

The feathers just fixed themselves sometimes, and I chose to ignore them in hopes they will fix themselves.

They did, every so often.

This one is where I made sure the head was as level as it could be compared to the movement of the body.

I tweaked the feet to give it a more natural feel as well as rotating the body a tiny amount.

I wanted to have the eagle flap a few times before soaring, so that was my next step and I cycled all the keyframes, then baked them so I had 3 wing flaps and stopped the cycle to work on the gliding part.

The next step was to animate the eagle coming out of the wings beating down into a glide with the wings outstretched. When I chose to bake the animation I kept half a wing flap where it was coming down to mid-point. I started with the wings to move slightly as birds don't keep them still in a glide, then worked on the body movement.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_3L9CuiAY4&feature=youtu.be

21.1.14

Flight cycle sketches

Here are the sketches I was using when I was animating the wings flapping from online reference.

This was comparing real bird wings to the rig I was using.

15.1.14

Wing improvement

Flying animation

The horse animation is on hold for a little while.

So I moved onto the flying eagle this week, which I suppose would be a bit simpler. Rig is still a bit dodgy, but workable and there are plenty of references for it such as;

http://www.brendanbody.co.uk/flight_tutorial/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thEkFMaB5CA&list=PLFBsfzVsWWmlTB-N_iLVVYK4-U-As6ULC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVfFOcxJf2k

So here's some process videos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVfFOcxJf2k

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAqBMEZTW94&feature=youtu.be

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E1mByB0hoM&feature=youtu.be
This one has some feathers sticking out. This rig is pretty delicate that if I move a wing wrong or just move it, a feather would randomly poke out which slows down my progress to try and correct it so it doesn't look as bad.

bottom view
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8qx_T1_8MA&feature=youtu.be

Here's the most recent
Front - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnzYYm0NS6A&feature=youtu.be
I've rotated the wings on the up and downward beat.

Side - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNKs24649PQ&feature=youtu.be
At the base of the wing there is a weight error, I think. Where it pops up. I'm struggling to correct that, but I think I'll leave that until later. The wings folding back doesn't look right, it makes it look like it's swimming rather than flying.

Top - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmDGSZJZmDM&feature=youtu.be
This view makes the wings folding back more obvious and not as good as I thought it would be, so I will have to move them forward again and not fold them as much. I think it would've looked ok on a smaller bird, not an eagle.

7.1.14

key frame roughs

Unfortunately my PC has died. These aren't the best photos of the sketches, but it's all I have until it's fixed.

These are the main key frames for my animation to get an idea of how I want them to move.