11/29/15 - Dot Animation Test

I have no clue what I'm doing here.  haha

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.

Which way is it rotating?  Left?  Or right?  :)

11/27/15 - Precision Animation Test (Part 2)

(final animation)

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.  :)

11/25/15 - Precision Animation Test (Part 1)

(Still "onion skin" image)

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.

Gifs below:

11/24/15 - Hand Animation Attempt

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.

11/3/15 - Animated GIF Test

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.