Here is my fourth entry for the Merlin’s ball and box project. I ran into some weird bugs with my playblast, and I sorted through most of them, but my resolution gate has vanished on the playblast. I built the animation to be viewed a little bit closer up, and the problem with the resolution gate has revealed things that should not be visible, Argh. Oh well for my next playblast if the problem persists I will attempt to move the camera a little bit closer so that it is not an issue. This is the entire animation sequence, it is still in linear mode, but I do have the vast majority of my keys in their and the big task I have left is to convert everything over to spline tangents and then adjusting the curves so that everything looks proper, I’m hoping to do that for my next update. I like the way this has turned out so far, though admittedly there have been a few differences from my original thumbnails. I feel the changes have strengthened the animation though ( one sprite is just as effective and a lot less noisy than four). I am wondering how much of an arc I should be putting in with the sprite moving that fast though. I still haven’t had a chance to deal with the critiques that were recommended in the last entry, however I intend to deal with them on my next pass. So without further ado, here is my third pass on the animation.
I will edit in the critiques, once I receive any from conceptshare. I’m hoping to have another entry up on Friday the 1st of March, with the appropriate corrections made as well as all the curves converted to spline tangents, or plateaus or whatever might cause it to become a bit more dynamic.
Edited March 1, 2013 – 3:00 PM
Alright so this time I’ve received lots of feed back from Darko Cesar on Conceptshare, thank you, an it’s posted here:
Hi Shawn,lots of work….For start, it would be good to shift from linear to auto tangents, or so…..because we have to make sure you break the tangents to get right arcs and timing. That would work for the box and the ball through out the whole shot.When ball gets out of the box….it should bounce-off at least once….otherwise it feels like the ball fell on a Velcro. The same goes when the ball lends on the box and on the table.
On frame 146, squash pose should be turned toward the side where the ball will go, and then when stretched, the ball should follow the trail like bullet
on fr 276 and 286, the ball should be stretched and instead of hold, the ball should bounce-off, and then stop. The same goes for hold on fr 131.
if you like that style of bouncing, you should have at list one or two frames between squash on fr 451 and up on fr 452, and then the same between that one and squash on fr 453.
I want to say, thank you very much for your help on this project and that I appreciate the feedback very much. I’m just about to head over to Maya and throw most of my animation curves into spline/plateau/auto and I do hope that will help get some of the feel on the bounces right. I’m going to take a few minutes before that and find and address the specific comments you made for the frames listed. I’m also going to go through and ensure that the earlier comments are also dealt with and then I’ll begin tweaking out the curves and I’ll hope to have an update before too long.