This is a great challenge, and I'm in for sure.

Has anyone got any suggestions as to how you'd parent two FK arms to a bat? I've got no problem at all parenting one hand, but the second is proving to be a bit of a nightmare. Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Looking good, iest_rob! I especially love that stretchy pose before the swing. My only critique would be that with such a huge anticipation, the swing would be A LOT faster. Maybe only a couple of frames. I love the way he creeps up on it.

Great contrast in timming! good job Iest

I personally think that the body acts a bit weird from 42 to 46.
Besides, overall looks very well, I especially like the moment when the char shaking his hand during a moving hold at around 100.
so..correct me if i'm wrong.

way to go pal.

Last edited by Vien Nguyen (07-15-2011 9:51 am)

@iest_rob ... nice concept.....but don't you think that in the last frame , you are breaking the whole rig and its kind of hurting the character????? i mean like his whole upper body is twisted.....just my own personal opinion......great work though.....

Hi Iest!
Great, I like it!
What springs to my eye is that you need to take care of the baseball bat's arcs. They're really distracting from 35-56 and 163-188. In frame 38-41 it looks to me as if he breaking his wrist?

Edit: Sorry I should have read your post before commenting But the slow down around frame 175 takes out much of the force of his stroke, so maybe you want to address that

Keep going!
Emarston, it's still very hard to tell anything from that blocking pass, but I think from the speed the gun is coming down it doesn't look as if the zombie's head could have been knocked away that fast...

Cheers!

Wolfi

Last edited by wolfor (07-18-2011 4:43 pm)

Hi!
Looks much better on the first arc, the second would need some minor refinements (sorry for the crude drawings, a mouse is not a pencil ):

here I would add a little more drag, so you get a nice flowing motion on that position.

I would skip frame 170 completely, that just slows the motion down


here you just need to polish this arc, if this position jumps too much because you took the previous frame out, try to fit his position 20% nearer to the position in frame 170, but keep the bat stretched out like the picture.


here you need to take the bat out of his silhouette so it reads better and also for a better spacing.

thats for the arcs. A colleague of mine was the opinion that the energy of this stroke should make him spin around a lot more, but that's just a suggestion.

Btw, I remember being to Snowdonia as a kid, I remembered this because of the cool name and I think we stayed in or near a Town called Llanwrst which I remembered because the name (more or less) resembles "country-sausage" in German (Land-Wurst)
Wow, I guess I haven't thought about this for at least 20 years

Last edited by wolfor (07-19-2011 5:15 pm)

Hey, you're welcome! I'm really glad I can help And this is not without self interest: Helping others sharpens your eye for your own work and mistakes

I had a look at your blog and I really like your pictures, I remember Mt. Snowdon a little different, we had some ghastly weather with a lot of wind (well that's nothing new, I know )
I'm from Munich, but my Grandparents used to live in Freiburg at the Meisenberg and my Uncle still lives in Freiburg. I love Freiburg, you chose a beautiful city to stay in Germany 

Last edited by wolfor (07-19-2011 9:45 pm)

kiopaa wrote:

Just the beginning of my animation :

Looks nice! I would change the timing of the hit, to make it considerably faster. Whats more, take a look at this picture:

You see that you can go way more extreme on your poses, you're using a cartoon character, after all

Cheers!

Wolfi

Last edited by wolfor (07-20-2011 11:22 am)

@IEST_rob: My close friend saw your animation and he laughed a lots )

Keep going pal!

Hey there Kiopaa!

It's looking really nice. One thing that you might benefit from is an actual frame where contact is made with the ball and bat. Right now, I can see that the ball gets hit, but I'm not feeling it, so I think by adding a contact frame in there it would sell the hit much better.

Also, work a little on the final pose. Right now it's not very appealing. Perhaps you could make him go into the stance that tennis player go into when they're waiting for the return of the ball, you know that hunched over one, with the racquet in both hands, center of the body. It'll just give a little story to the piece I think.

Also, the pose on f26 could do with being a little clearer. We lose the knee on the screen left leg, and it looks strange.  Really twist the body back - in the direction of the shoulder that's holding the racquet, and pose the knee out, because as you go into the pose at f32, all the momentum seems to be lost, as the pose on f32 doesn't seem very energetic.

Good stuff, It's shaping up nicely!

I'm not sure why penguin put a restriction on the aspect ratio, but in any case all it means is the dimensions of the movie, the width divided by height. For example 720 / 1280 = 1.777, if you divide 16 by 9 you get 1.777, so 1280x720 is a 16:9 ratio. However, that would be unrealistic for posting on here, so if you divided each dimension by 2 you'd get 640x360, which would be an acceptable dimension/aspect ratio.

So, to playblast to these dimension, (assuming Maya), right click on the timeline > Playblast > Option Box. Click "Custom Settings' under the dimension and enter 640 and 360 as the width and height. Then playblast and make sure it's a .mov file, and host it on dropbox.

Good to go