AuthorTopic: Running Corgi Animation  (Read 2910 times)

Offline DatMuffinMan

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Running Corgi Animation

on: December 24, 2013, 10:43:36 pm
I think I have most of this animation down as far as motion/form goes, but I would like to get more feedback from others before I start cleaning it up so that I don't waste time on perfecting mistakes.



Aside from the horrible lineart and jumpiness of the white stripes around his neck, are there any other things that should be changed?

For some reason, this 5-frame animation seems to look a lot better... or maybe it's just me. I only removed the frame where the dog is at its highest "peak."

« Last Edit: December 25, 2013, 03:19:22 am by DatMuffinMan »

Offline astraldata

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Re: Running Corgi Animation

Reply #1 on: December 25, 2013, 06:57:50 am
His rear end + thighs shrink as his back legs kick out. In addition to that, his back feet just look weird and don't seem to follow any kind of arcs at all. More importantly, however, and most fundamentally wrong, is the fact that, if this is a dog, he's hopping like a bunny.

Dogs walk like most quadrupeds. You should look up some references on animal locomotion.

With that being said, his head and ears, and front legs look pretty decent. The only technical problems outside of the aforementioned stuff I can see is that you just need to pay more attention to the changing size of your body masses over time as you animate and watch your silhouettes as they overlap between frames to be sure your movement follows some kind of arc for each and every mass attached.

You might be better off animating groups of circles or different-colored blobs of pixels to keep track of masses so that when you get your animation right on a construction level, you can add the details such as face/floppy-ears/color, etc. later.

Thankfully you approached this animation with some concern that it might need to be redone, and rightfully so. I would just suggest that you abandon any hint of detail (even the extremely simplistic style you have here) until you get the base construction of your animation 100% correct to save yourself a LOT of mini-hassles from being distracted w/maintaining the shape of the head / mouth / eyes / flop of the ears, etc. etc. -- it will make your workflow go SO much easier.
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Offline DatMuffinMan

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Re: Running Corgi Animation

Reply #2 on: December 25, 2013, 03:08:20 pm
Thanks for the criticisms. As far as I can tell, the main difference between bunnies and dogs is that dogs never have their front and back legs hitting the ground at the same time. I tried to fix that here, as well as the swelling rear end and thighs.

Offline PixelPiledriver

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Re: Running Corgi Animation

Reply #3 on: December 26, 2013, 12:54:29 am
Can't find the video I'm looking for but these are decent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrAlxe3SRiw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSHb98-C8V4

Each gait has different speed and mobility.
Body size and limb length might also affect these some.
The gait of a smaller dog is probly slightly different than a bigger dog.

You have something closest to a gallop I suppose.
Try offsetting each pair of legs from each other by just a few frames.
Also try doubling the number of frames and changing only parts of the animation on the second loop, such as the ears.
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