Did some more complete animation of a bird's flight cycle.
Did some extremely simple animation showing the basic phases of flight that I'd observed in the videos I've taken and the birds I've seen. (Excluding deceleration and landing phases - but deceleration has the same sort of large wing movements as acceleration as the bird tries to throw air in front of it rather than under it.) Ok, Noah's Ark Farm didn't have any bears, so I've had to borrow mb1968ca's video for my own analysis. This is the original: And here is my break down of it, slowing it down and then isolating key positions within the movement from which I can extrapolate the full movement from. Like the tiger movement, there's a fair amount of flick in the paws of the bear as he walks - in fact probably more than in the tiger, being a plantigrade rather than a digitigrade, as the whole "foot" is rotating around the wrist, rather than just the toes. There is movement in the bear's head, but it's hard to capture from a side on view - and a completely static head doesn't look right, so in my own attempt to work out the walk I included a head-bob, which seems to work pretty well. Did some animation based on the analysis I'd done so far of the tiger movements. I did some analysis on the best of the footage that I got of the tiger at Noah's Ark Farm, looking at the way that the legs move and the way that the head bobs. The legs seemed to move in something of a pendulum motion, with the front paw remaining nearly in place until the back paw had started to catch up with it, giving it the impression of that desk toy with the balls that demonstrate conservation of momentum.
The legs on one side also appear to stop moving when the legs on the other side are in motion. In higher speed motion, of course, all of the legs are in motion at once, but as you can see here, this is more of a slow pr The head also bobs when the tiger is in motion, rising and falling as the weight shifts, with the front paws appearing to be the determining factor in relation to the timing of the rises and falls. Extra analysis on the tail is in my sketchpad. I animated Joey, did the backgrounds and compiled mine and Matias' work together, and this was the end result.
So, trying to narrow down exactly what I'm gonna look at so that I'm not doing fuck-all for lots of things, but doing something decent for a few things. There's three main classifications for quadrupeds:
- Unguligrade - point of toes (typically hooves) - Plantigrade - flats of feet - Digitigrade - toes I'm thinking the plantigrade one that I'm gonna analyse would be the bear. It'd help me out if I use Joey later on in other things, so I think it'll be worth having that knowledge to hand. The unguligrade, I'm probably gonna be unoriginal and analyse a horse. From what I can tell, most unguligrades have extremely similar walks anyway, so in terms of animation, it'll probably have lots of transferable principles. Digitigrade will probably be a tiger, because I got a pretty damn good video of the tiger at Noah's Ark Farm, so that'll be good to break down, then look into other tiger/cat movements. I finished doing the animation for the other shot that Joey is in. The only line here is a bear roar, but still, needs mouth movements synced to it. One thing that I noticed animating this, is that most of the time, you can get away with a surprisingly small amount of animation. Most of the body animation here is the three main poses with varying amounts of squash and stretch to give the impression of movement, and it seems to work pretty well. There's almost no sort of real in-betweens.
I had to put the front right paw on a separate layer so that it'd be in front of Joey's head at the start of the shot, which posed an interesting issue about trying to make it stay in line with the movement of the rest of the body. But at the same time, the slight difference in movement on the leg seems to have a little bit of a stabilising effect on the character motion as a whole. Also, originally, he was going to end the shot with his head held up, but I realised that Joey's head pops up into shot in the other lip syncing moment, so his head had to come back down at the end of this one in order for it to make sense narratively. |