(Swashbuckling) Hands

[Grizzly Pirate RedVanbeard]: Yar, hands be tricky devil to animate. For they be subtle and expressive and complicated in oh-so-many ways.


I agree wholeheartedly with my split personality, but seeing as he has now descended into the shadowy depths of my psyche I must now go it alone with the remainder of this post. I will try to contain the dribbling to a bare minimum.

We in the field of computer animation have an easy life when it comes to keeping things on-model. We already have a puppet and when we move it about a bit in meaningful ways - whap! - animationy goodness comes out. Ace.

The problem with this is that seeing as the character turns up in the workspace with default poses for every part of the character, it can be very tempting to listen to the inner lazy and not do very much in the way of complex manipulation. After all, more curves touched = more a pain in the arse to deal with, right?

Of course, this is not the right way to be approaching things at all. Working with this mentality will just leave you with animation that looks robotic, lifeless, and unappealing! Creating performance requires you to think through all of the posing, from head to toe, and everything in between.

Of all body bits, hands are often the first victims to fall foul of the laissez-faire approach, (particularly in 3D animation). The fingers have a bazillion joints and need a lot of work to get looking right due to the complex and subtle ways in which we use them to communicate. This is all tough stuff, of course, but if the time is spent on this good stuff then it makes such a difference to how a pose is interpreted by the viewer, as all the visual cues are subconsciously assimilated.

Here a cool thing to demonstrate all of my babble - sketches of some of Jafar's hand poses from "Aladdin", drawn by Andreas Deja. Click for bigness. If you hit 'All Sizes' on Flickr you can get to Original mega-bigness. Yum!

Look at the lovely shapes these boney fingers can create. Much better than our default pose, eh? You can certainly see the rest of the body attitude just from each drawing and this just goes to show how much impact a good hand pose can have on the effectiveness of the pose as a whole. I would love to see more of this attention to detail in this new-fangled computer medium, and that is why the inner pirate had to surface.

[Grizzly Pirate RedVanbeard]: ??? Yaaaar!

*Dribble*

Another Doodle

Got to keep trying, eh?

Doodles

Pengy

Denis drew this for me when we were working on Mad and I put it up in my cube. Ace, huh?

AWN - ooof!

I got embroiled in a bit of a spat on the AWN forums. It was about the importance of drawing ability in animation. Go have a looky. What do you think?

If being able to draw amazing stuff was a requirement for being an animator, I would never have got to where I am now. You know, dear readers - you've seen my little doodles!

Tardy

Haven't had much time to write blog posts lately, so apologies about that. It seems that a lot of the animation blogs I keep tabs on have been quiet also as people quietly beaver away on their various productions. Good luck to you all, I say!

I have been trying to do some more tablet PC doodles and stuff, but my copy of Photoshop to know that I've done something I'm happy with and crashes before I can save the gitting image. I took the machine away on holiday and tried to do some 2D animation, (the lady next to me on the plane thought I was using an Etch-a-sketch!) but was so creatively knackered that nothing really came of it. From what I've seen so far Plastic Animation Paper looks to be a little unwieldy as you start to build up frames, but maybe I'm doing it wrong? A dope sheet would seem to be a better alternative to the film strip idea it supplies anyway. I've got a frame and I want to hold it, not make a zillion copies of the thing!

Anyway, I shall dive back in when time and laziness allow, and will post stuff at some point.

Doggie

We went to Kau'ai...

...and that is why you haven't heard a peep out of me. Here are some photographs.

A couple catching small, silver fish on Anini Beach:

The Mesh having fun with an old sheet:

Wow!

This is pretty amazing. People creating animation with lights and low shutter speed cameras, straight ahead, frame by frame. There's even squash and stretch going on!

I's just wikkid, man, innit!