Just bouncing off the idea from my last post of animating via dots.
In this instance, I took a precise circular rotation and duplicated it twice, once stretched horizontally by 200%, and once stretched vertically by 200%. What the application of this might be… I have no idea. But it is interesting to note that if you look closely at the two stretched squares they can actually be perceived as 3-dimensional, with either side of the rotation coming closer or farther to us. You can inverse this as well so that each plane is facing up, down, left, or right.
The final animation. A little wonky, but still fairly accurate, and an interesting test nonetheless. Obviously, no one would ever animate a square like this in the real world. They would just set two keyframes and be done with it. But as I said in my previous post, this was just a simple attempt to maintain precision of an object by hand, since that's really what traditional animation is all about, working frame by frame.
My ultimate findings? Precision animation takes A LOT of laying things out in advance, and A LOT of practice.
(final animation w/ vertex points)
Here's an interesting alternate look at the animation. I've provided every final animation point, which I used to systematically plot out the lines of the square. This gives me a much easier glance at where I went wrong, since the dots clearly don't form a perfect circle. In hindsight, I really should have attempted to plot all of these on one frame in the beginning (each set of 4 were actually all on their own separate frame), so I could immediately gauge how accurate my rotation would be.
Looking at this second gif also gives me ideas of how various software/computers themselves might actually interpret keyframe commands. Obviously, it wouldn't just be hitting a set of dots on a grid as is the case with my animation, but something more like a spline curve, with various points dictated by how many frames it spreads over. I'm fascinated with that kind of stuff, so I could definitely see revisiting this with a set of "math animations". There's something very cool about translating numbers and coordinates into visual representations/animations. After all, that's the basis of all computer graphics, right?
Alright, I'm talking too much now, I gotta stop. haha But my final takeaways? 1. I need a lot of practice in laying out animations, and 2. I think I'm gonna do some math-based animations in the future. :)
Technically, this isn't true precision, since I didn't use math or rulers or anything like that… but I wanted to try to animate a square rotating as precise as possible by hand. This forced me to play around with laying out the animation first, and fairly systematically figuring out where everything needs to go and when. Ultimately, this is an attempt to maintain exact size, proportioning, and positioning of an object over the course of a little more than a second of animation.
A somewhat failed attempt at animating a cartoon hand, haha. I think I captured a fairly nice flow overall, but there's a lot of inconsistencies throughout the short loop. The thumb switching sides is probably the most notable. LOL
I definitely need some more practice sketching static hand poses from my own imagination, as well as a better knowledge of Flash (or whatever other program I might use for animation), before I should try anything more complex than this.
And now I'm finally back to sketching freehand. I'm sure there's a pun in there somewhere… ;) Basically I just sketched these while glancing at my left hand every now and then, posing for visual reference. I was not trying to emulate any particular style or pose from another character, but simply letting myself sketch freely. I still have a lot of practice left to go before I really get a hang of things, but I think I've definitely improved after sketching all those preexisting characters.
Winding down with my hand sketches now. This should be my last sketch using reference from existing material. My final reference for today's post? Various characters from another great animated series: "Phineas and Ferb". Much like Hey Arnold, this style is way more what I had originally imagined when I first thought of doing these "cartoon" hands. Again, I kept things fairly rough since I wanted to try to pump out more in the 10-15 min. timeframe.
Been missing a few posts lately, just been busy with a lot of stuff and didn't get around to them. Or it might be that I'm starting to get a little tired of sketching hands, haha. But I have a few more posts of them to go, so I'll finish them up and then who knows what I'll do! lol
Today's post is all about the show "Hey Arnold!". Not specifically Arnold himself, but just various hand designs in general. THIS type of design is probably what I was really imagining when I first thought about sketching "cartoon" hands, as opposed to more realistic designs like Aladdin, Beast, Chernabog, etc. Fairly simple and straightforward, pretty much always the "4 fingers" design, and no real texture details. Perfect for making a long-running animated series for instance, or in my case short web-series (as I vaguely have an idea for one right now). More info on that in like 2 years. LOL
I didn't clean it up as much as I usually do today; I just wanted to focus more on quantity under time constraints for this one.
Now this guy seriously has some of the coolest animated hands ever. I spent way longer on him than I should have, but I had fun. My first non-Disney character: Nicodemus from "The Secret of NIMH".
Milo from "Atlantis". A similar design to Kuzco's, again very stylized. It'd be interesting to compare those two purely on their differences in body language. I had a bit of trouble with this design as well though. You'd think I'd have an easier time with these stylized designs, since they're relatively simple compared to the Beast or Chernabog or something. Yet, for whatever reason they're still more difficult for me. I've also never really been a fan of this sort of "box" design with square edges as the fingertips, but it's certainly a unique design nonetheless and has always stuck out to me ever since I was a little kid.
One of the thinner male characters, Kuzco from "The Emperor's New Groove". They look okay, but I feel like I have trouble sketching the more stylized designs like these. That bottom pose looks way too much like E.T. to me. haha
Timon from "The Lion King". Had a bit of trouble with this one. I don't think I could quite figure out the shape of his fingers/fingertips. Looks alright now, but this one took me notably longer than my normal posts.
Still sketching cartoon hands… or should I say… paws. Gonna do a few of the more humanoid animal characters now. First up: Baloo from "The Jungle Book". Probably the simplest of my hand sketches so far, and a very pleasant design in my opinion.
Interesting to note, he seems to continually switch between having 3 or 4 claws. I imagine this is to make sketching and painting easier for wide shots vs. tight shots, though I'd just assume stick with 3 claws for everything so there's no discrepancy.
Getting back to sketching cartoon hands again, trying to finish up the rest that I planned to do. Today's post: Cruella de Vil (I think that's how you spell it?). Man, she must be the thinnest Disney character ever! Although it could be Yzma...
P.S. I should totally devote a post to studying the way they did Cruella's smoke effects in the film. There's at least one shot in particular that has this really unique style, more like flames or something. It's pretty fascinating.
This should be the last of these tests. Just trying out a gif today. A simple "rubber band" ball bounce. Approx. 15 min.
I'm actually really pleased with how this animation came out; looks a lot smoother than I thought it would. :) Gotta figure out the right frame rate settings though.
Another test before I get back to my normal posts. This time it's all about video, which (if it works) will broaden the scope of my blog to include daily practice of editing, visual effects, complex animations, animatics, etc. (as opposed to just simple gif loops)
Blogspot Video:
YouTube Embed (same video as above):
Blogspot Video (for Audio) #1:
Blogspot Video (for Audio) #2:
Attempted to crop the video to a very thin horizontal size to give it more of an audio track feel, rather than video.
(DIDN'T WORK)
FINAL RESULTS:
AUDIO: (YOUTUBE EMBED) I don't think I'm a fan of Blogspot's own video system (it doesn't have a progress bar while uploading, and my internet is slow, so it's kind of a pain to work with), but it does work. Although, I'm thinking that just uploading everything to YouTube will be the easiest for me. Also, that would link it to my various YouTube channels (at least to more knowledgeable users), which is definitely a plus. I'll probably upgrade to SoundCloud in the future though, cause that was my favorite for an audio experience (but it costs money, so yeah).
VIDEO: (YOUTUBE EMBED) As mentioned before, Blogspot's own video upload system was kind of a pain to work with. For today's test I compressed the video down to 10 MB, and that took FOREVER to upload, with no indicator that it was even working or not. It did work in the end, but YouTube will be a much easier system for me to work with.
Anyway, I guess that means I'll be able to do more with this blog! :D
Going a really different direction for today's post. This time I'm just testing around with how to upload/embed audio files on Blogspot. If it works, I'll be able to broaden the scope of this blog to include daily practice of music composition, piano practice, sound editing/sound design, etc.
I couldn't just upload an mp3 straight to Blogspot (there is a video option though, which I'll test in a future post), so ultimately it came down to these two options:
SoundCloud:
Google Drive:
(DIDN'T WORK)
I like the look of SoundCloud's better (and how it links any future viewers/listeners to my SoundCloud music account), but there's a finite amount of minutes I can upload to SoundCloud and I'd rather save that for polished works. 173 minutes left with SoundCloud before I would have to upgrade, and nearly 15 GB with Google Drive left before I would have to upgrade. So I think I'll stick with Google Drive for now. But if I someday feel like spending $15/month I'll use SoundCloud's "Pro Unlimited" plan, which would allow me to upload as many of these daily practices as I want.
EDIT: Google Drive didn't work, but I was able to convert the track into a video file so I'll be using that for audio/music files instead. SoundCloud is still my favorite though, so it may eventually become that.
