Merlin’s Ball – Entry 3

For this post my goal was to take my existing “thumbnail” animation and convert it over to a linear animation. This turned out to be a great opportunity to rework all of my timings and to begin exploring how the animation might play out in a more straight ahead manner compared to the pose to pose method. I’ve reworked quite a bit of the timing and I’ve found a different way of moving my character around the scene that I like a bit more. With this pass everything is in linear mode, but I’ve put in most of the contacts, anticipations and breakdowns in so far. I had a bit of fun animating the books falling over and smashing the glass bottle. I still have to get the sprites in the animation but I’ve found that this has already taken a lot more frames and time to get even this far in the animation. I also had a few ideas that I spent a bit of time on before deciding that they weren’t working and needed to be scrapped. I am still planning on finishing the sprites and I am hoping that I’ll be able to add particles and fire effects on my last pass.

Ritter_Shawn_Merlin_FOA-O_1302_P2.mov:

Once again I have some critiques from my instructor AJ Viviani, How mentioned 2 main things.

For these hits on the box(the initial jumps), keep the apex neutral in rotation, but then place any rotation on the box the frame it leaves the ground, and then counter that rotation(that is, rotate in the opposite) with a key the frame before you contact the ground flat.  This’ll get you a very cool overlappy feel to the box being struck into the air from the inside.

And

The timing on this jump into the box is a bit slow.(the first time our hero rams the box to move it)  I’d (save, then) tighten that up by 2-3 frames or so.

I think there’s a lot of potential for those two recommendations, and I will attempt to implement them as soon as possible, unfortunately I’ve already finished my next pass, so I’ll try to grab those on my next next pass. =)

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