Wednesday, May 6, 2009

jumping ball with overlapping tail motion

My hand-drawn 2D interpretation of the fourth Animation Mentor assignment.



I've committed a classic art school student mistake here... making the assignment more complicated than it needed to be. The actual assigned task was just to animate the ball doing three jumps with overlapping motion on the trailing tail, all from a straight side view.

Trying to draw this from an angle made this mega harder. In CG the computer handles perspective and character size and volume for you automatically. In 2D that's a battle you fight on every frame.

The falling block was an off-topic addition too. If you watch it it does a nice little bounce as it hits the ground, but if you're watching the block you're not watching the ball and tail, which was the real object of the assignment.

Drawing that solid block in perspective as it tips over was a time-eating challenge, and I could have gotten a better result, faster by animating it in 3D (with Animation:Master, of course) and rotoscoping that into my drawings. Which I will do in the future if I need any tumbling solids.

I'll give myself a passing grade on this. I don't think this would be "A" work but I think it shows successful overlapping motion.

3 comments:

Dhar said...

I remember doing the planning for that assignment in 2D as well (FlipBook)But yours turned out far more refined. Nice job.

Morgan Oughton said...

I know this post is mega old...but I just came across your blog as I was doing John K's tutorials and it's amazing me how much you, as a 3D animator has to learn or relearn to make classic animation. I'm loving your work though..very inspirational :-)

Robert said...

Thanks!

Of course I can't claim to be an A-list 3D animator either, but the knowledge of the concepts only gets me so far, the actual execution of the work is a whole new grind to conquer.