First animation test!

It's been a while since we posted, but that's doesn't mean no work got done! Here's our first playblast from Cursed Gold. Notice that some of this is on 2s--we're trying to mimic a traditional animation style as much as possible. In fact, there's no interpolation used here at all, except that I used the Tween Machine to help set breakdowns. Basically, I kept setting breakdowns till the shot was done. The only thing I used the graph editor for was to run Euler Filter every time some rotation got way out of whack, but I eventually turned that into a MEL button and didn't even need to open the graph editor for that.

I suspect this will look even better when we have the final toon rendering style worked out, though. One of the things I noticed about 2s, is that they're way more forgiving then 1s--when they work at all. This is one of the reasons I'm so interested in animating like a drawn animator--there's so much you can get away with when you're leaving more of the motion up to the audience's imagination. CG tends to make motion really overdetermined.

BUT the issue with 2s is that in most CG they don't work. They just look like you're dropping frames in playback or something. My guess is that this is due to the perfection of CG shading. It seems to work a lot better if you can get a large amount of flat color in your character's shape, which I've done to some extant with lighting in the playblast above. For the final render, we plan to have no shading at all except for rims to pick out the shapes.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun animating this!

--Raf