Saturday, January 21, 2012

Polishing the Transform Animation

I spent a lot of today finishing up that transform animation. It gave me more trouble than a lot of the others because I had started the first pass straight ahead on 1's, 2's and 4's without much of a plan. The result I got was basically good, but needed a lot of polish

Here's what I had started with:
It's not the worst thing in the world, but there are parts that could be clarified. The idea of the transform was that his arms would pop into wings and pull him up. As a friend pointed out to me, it really isn't clear that his arms are what's changing. It almost just looks like wings are popping out of his back.

The reason is that the initial antic pose for his arm was all scrunched up like so:
Which I think could have been kind of fun....if anyone could see it...

The fact that I followed that with a vague smear didn't help much.

Fixing it was a simple matter of making a bigger deal out of his arm before it changed
I made the arm pose a little cleaner and had it slow in to the anticipation so that it stays around that pose for an extra frame before popping off. I also replaced the vague smear with a clearer morphing pose.

Here it is animated:
The next real issue is that the spacing's a bit of a mess. Since I did a lot of it straight ahead I hadn't planned for proper slow ins and outs, so his bounce is a little mushy. I went over the whole thing and pushed his up and down extremes a little further, while cleaning up the overall arc a bit. 
The differences are subtle, but there. From there it was mostly clean-up.
I cleaned up the body and arms first as they're the main action. The legs are all follow through, and the face is largely secondary, so I threw them inside of symbols to be dealt with later.
Then I dealt with them.

...guess that's it...

'Till next time.

1 comment:

  1. That turned out to be really cool looking and a really interesting way to handle the transformation, way cooler than what I had in mind.

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