I was actually pleasantly surprised with the articulation of the puppet — there are of course problems with it, but far fewer than I'd initially anticipated.
The wing tip articulation isn't entirely natural — no matter where I put the anchor point, it rotates in a really odd way, but to be entirely honest it's mostly a limitation with the puppet format in general. There's not really any easy way I could get it to move in a lifelike manner without using multiple layers/shapes for each position. It's not an entirely huge deal — the wing isn't going to need to flex or bend to those extremes during this pose so what we have should suffice.
The other thing to note are the outlines — each section of limb is outlined individually, so when another section is rotated it reveals the outline of the piece underneath it. Again, not a huge deal in this case, but definitely worth bearing in mind when making other puppets. I'll just need to be a bit careful to clean up the outlines, maybe do a few rotation tests in Photoshop first (which is really what I should have done here) before dropping it into After Effects.
Bit of a problem with the head — the neck isn't quite long enough, so if rotated too far back then we get this weird sort of gap appearing. Luckily a simple fix, and again, I doubt her head will need to go this far back at this stage... However, it may also interfere with the head bob on the walk cycle, so I'll probably need to find a way to correct it.
The main thing with the head is that it needs more divisions — the head and the neck should really be separate. This will allow for much looser animation and a better bobbing motion for the head on the walk.
The beak, again, probably isn't going to need to open at this stage, but it's probably worth thinking about fixing it up. I could simply alter the lower beak to include the tongue and inside of the beak, so when it's rotated downwards it will appear to be opening properly.
Enough rambling, on with the animation...
It's very, very rough at this stage — plenty of problems to dissect! It's quite difficult working from such fuzzy reference — I can't see what the crow's feet are doing on the videos I have, so I'm having to make some educated guesses.
The main issues are the timing, I think. Birds, being creatures of flight, are quite awkward and clunky on the ground, so they seem to exert a lot of effort in actually getting their legs up and over. It's quite a slow pick up and they lift their feet quite high to avoid scraping the ground, then really sort of push them forward before dropping them very quickly onto the ground. I think that I need to exaggerate the lift of the leg as it comes up and over, bring the hip much higher and move the wing up to give the impression that the body is tilting away. I'll need to speed up the foot coming down onto the ground — it's more of a 'stamp' and they kind of fall forwards rather than having a graceful descent.
Their hips tend to push forward with the leading leg, so I'll probably change around the rotation of the body slightly and see how it works.
Another puppet problem became apparent as I was animating — the feet need to be divided up more. At the moment, each foot is on one layer, which means I can't get any sort of foot roll as they push the body upwards. I'll need to separate the toes from the base of the foot and have those move independently.
Jazzy's very kindly been shooting some reference footage for me of the local crows, which will help immensely in analysing the walk! I think I'm probably jumping too far ahead — what I might do is try breaking down the walk into key poses, similar to a human cycle — contact and passing positons etc. — and use that as a basis rather than running straight ahead and trying to just copy some footage.
Any other feedback is greatly appreciated! :]
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