Talonflame animation and composite

Since I have lost the after effects files we worked on with Brett, I decided to try and composite an animation into a filmed environment. Not having time to make a model, I found a website that hosts rigged Pokemon characters ripped from the 3Ds games, and decided to use Talonflame to make a video in a similar style to the Pokemon GO trailer.

The idea was to have animated him to land on my balcony, so I looked up some animation reference of hawks, the animal Talonflame is based on.

This helped a lot, but I still feel my animation is pretty stiff! I found it really hard to guess how the landing should look and also folding the wings. (which the rigging really wasn’t suited to doing)

I had to learn a lot of things to make the animation look at least somewhat believable in the scene. My footage was really shaky, so I did a little research and learned of the warp stabilizer, which worked really well, but the camera still moved enough that I had to learn how to track movement and apply that to layers as well, which I did by applying the movement tacker to a null object and then parenting that to any layers that needed to follow the movement of the camera.

I made a track matte mask on a shape layer to make sure Talonflame didn’t pass over the top of the railings, but encountered a problem when he landed to them, as his toes needed to be visible. I worked around this by making a small white shape on the luma track matte layer and keyframed it to move down as he lands.

I also applied a grain effect to the talonflame animation to make it fit better with my low quality camera footage. Along with this, I made him lighter when he is furthest away and had it blend to his normal colors, then to darker colors as he flew under the roof. To finish off I added a small shadow where he lands on the railings and added his cry to where he opens his mouth.

I don’t think the finished product is very believable and there is still a lot of mistakes, but I’m still pretty happy with it being my first independent project in after effects.

Carrot Animation

A little animation I’ve been working on in my free time. It was good practice for portraying weight as well as squash an stretch.

damn vegtables

Walk Cycle Practice

I tried my hand at 2D animation for the first time in a few years! Clearly I need to practice more, because it came out quite jerky. Actually doing the animation was quite tedious too, because I used Sai which doesn’t have any sort of timeline or animation preview tools. I drew each ‘frame’ on a new layer, and lowered the opacity of the other layers manually to create and onion skin effect. I had to export each layer as a separate image file and plug the series of images into and online gif maker before I could even see what it actually looked like animated! Then I would notice a few flaws and have to do that all over again. I think if I learned anything, it would be that I need some software that can animate things properly, haha!

I referenced the key frames off this image and then tweened it.

Hello and Welcome

To my research and development blog for my freshly started Bachelor of Animation course at SAE, Brisbane! Expect to see the progress on my assignments for MDU115, and maybe more if I am feeling productive. Please brace yourselves for an excess of words! This is what HSC Advanced English has done to me. I will never be the same.