New Walk Cycles

Swing, pass, swing, pass. That's what walking's always been about. But for some reason I neglected this important animation skill for a long time, settling for just swinging legs and arms back and forth without any thought into placement. Finally, I'm making some effort to improve, but the process will be slow. I started by making walk cycles for Ratchet and Ultra Magnus. It was fairly easy, since both their personalities work well with animation. Ultra's regal and majestic, so he walks upright and moves kind of stiffly. Ratchet's younger in this series than he's usually portrayed, but he's still pretty old, so while he moves faster then Ultra, he also walks with a hunch. I also animated his backpack to bump up and down a bit while walking.

My sudden interest in making actual walk cycle animations came to be when I was looking at one of the new clips, and noticing how stiff and awful the walking was.

I also found a way to reduce loading speed for characters: Smart Folders. Basically, in Cheetah3D, you can import a character from an external file inside another one. And though that sounds just like importing, for some reason it takes less time.

More posts coming soon!

Thought This Was Dead? Think Again!

Optimus stands in the corridor at last - thanks to my new computer's 2.9 GHz Intel Core i5!

Remember how I was always complaining about not having the disk space or memory to have multiple Transformers in the same scene? Well, now it's a whole new story. I'm pleased to announce that I finally have a new computer, and it renders at twice the speed of the old one.

I've been working for the two days on re-rendering all the old clips and animating new ones. As you can see from the image, the new renders are at 2000x1125 instead of 1280x720. This means I'll be able to share this to Vimeo at full quality. Also, with the new iMovie, titles and things don't get horribly decompressed and the sound is always in sync, so I'll finally be able to edit this thing like I want to.

Obviously, after some time spent away from the project, I've come to realize that I've been prepping far too much, and I should really just make it already. Unfortunately, that means cutting out Bumblebee, who never got his body. Don't worry, though, his head'll have a cameo somehow.

I'll also be rewriting the script I wrote, since I need to write the Bee out of it and also make some of the exposition less lengthy. Plus, the dialogue wasn't working for me.

You'll notice in the final short some weird glitchy shadows, at least in the early parts. That's a bug with Cheetah3D that has a fix, but it isn't an easy one, and would make the renders take up to three times as long.

But yeah, it's been a while. More than half a year, in fact.

Hopefully I'll stay on track this time.

More updates coming your way soon, so follow by email so you know what's going on when it's going on.