During this week as I was finishing up lots of things I did get most of the things I wanted done. I couldn't finish my final animation however but I'll still present what I have for the class if they want to see it. The software converting the videos all went smoothly and I could put all of them on youtube to put on the final presentation. So far nobody has seen the channel which is nice because I wasn't really expecting anything and its nice to have a small channel. I don't expect the channel to go anywhere but I may keep posting videos there and change the name. I finished the punch animation this week as well which was really interesting, I used different angles than normal and really showed movement which I really liked. With my other animations I hadn't actually showed different angles and I think this was a good experiment. With the final animation I was working to complete the stuff I had worked on wouldn't render right and I had to figure that out which took longer than it should have. The animation wouldn't convert to the 15 fps that I had put it at which made it look super funny but I just saved it a few more times and it eventually worked. I'm actually pretty disappointed in myself for not being able to finish this last animation, I could have shown off how much I had grown but I only got to make 24 frames of it. If I could have finished this animation I would have made someone walk down the little hill I made then blow a bubble of gum and then pop it. I only got to making the background of the first little bit of it but I can at least show a little bit of something. Also I forgot to publish my blog after I had finished this weeks post so this one is a couple days late which is my fault.
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This was one of the most challenging weeks I've had so far but it was worth it in the end, even though the animation I took hours on was only 30 seconds. I had to make the dragon fly so I had to animate its wings and I had to make the tail move and had to make it turn all at the same time. The wings were such a huge obstacle that I had to get over but I did it and I'm glad I didn't give up because it looked pretty great. Instead of having the dragon fly off into the sunset I just made it fly off into a portal because if I had made the dragon fly off it probably would have taken a whole extra day. I can really see how much I've grown as an animator when I compare these 17 frames with the whole first animation I did. This part was very painstaking but I did it which makes me really proud of myself, if it wasn't hard then it wouldn't be fun. Also I made a really nice background mountain that took me quite some time as well. The trees/green wasn't supposed to look super great but the mountain looks very nice and I like how it turned out a lot. Next week I'm going to really step it up a ton so I can finish the punch animation and get enough of the gum animation to present it in class. I am also looking for a good screen recording app so I can use these videos because the software doesn't really have a good converting thing. I'll look up if there is a way to put these on youtube but for now I have to start the slide show and make sure everything is really put together and nice. I'm actually not very nervous about this at all because I can even see the difference in what I've made which makes me really happy. I'll have to take some extra time next week to finish everything up but I don't think that will be too much of a problem, I will find a way.
After I figured out mostly how the software worked again it said that it could update again but I didn't want to go through that so I just haven't updated it. During this week I have finished the dragon animation aside from about 20 frames which I'm going to make the dragon jump up then fly away in the distance. While I was actually animating the dragon I made a frame that took a pretty long time to make and I don't know how but it got deleted and I almost stopped working on the animation that day because that made me really angry. Besides that I finally gave the dragon eyes and teeth which I think look pretty good and I enjoy how that part turned out. It took a long time to animate the transition to the shape of the dragon I wanted, probably because I drew the final frame first. I've definitely learned from that and will not be drawing the last frame first anymore because it just makes things more difficult. After I finish this animation which won't be long I can finally concentrate on doing something new that I started last week that I was really excited about. I knew I wouldn't finish this if I didn't finish soon so I made this week all about it which was difficult and somewhat boring but I think I'm on the right track again. Making the dragon jump looked really funny but it worked and I think it will look super good at the end when I transition to the dragon flying away in the distance. This project has taken a long time and I really like that I've learned how to do this kind of thing but I could still do better which I am going to work on with the next animation which is going to be called something like bubble gum. I already have the first parts of that animation done because I was working on it last week, I think it will actually be fun to make that one. For the end of the dragon animation though I will make a different background for the flying part, maybe make a sunset or something.
There were a few pretty big setbacks this week which weren't the most fun to deal with and solve, the software updated that I had been using and I was almost completely lost on how to navigate it now. It took me a good while to figure out how to use the pallet of the software again which was disappointing because I had already gotten a process and it was thrown out of whack with this. The update basically separated things that were all together before and you have to move around the software a lot more to do things. Although there were some major setbacks this week at least I got more time to think about what I was going to do instead of just jumping in. Instead of continuing working on the punch animation or anything else I am going to finally finish the dragon animation before I do anything else. Contradictory to that statement I had make a new background for a new animation and I think I'm finally finding my style which is cool. The background pictures usually take a lot more time than the actual focus of the animation which is funny because you won't really pay attention to the background much. I did end up animating the background a little which I think is going to look great in the final product of this animation but I'll have to finish the dragon animation first. For the animated background I was just making clouds move at different speeds and making it look peaceful and calming almost. I want this animation to end up being really nice and fluffy feeling and just make people relaxed. I've been inspired by a lot of things to make some nice slow little animations, things have been going well for me at the moment and its affected the work I output. For the dragon animation however I'm going to make it do something cool like breathe fire then fly away which would be awesome. Usually when I animate I'm either in a destroy things and have explosions mindset or make fluffy clouds mindset. I didn't get much done this week but I am actually pretty proud of what I did, I didn't quit on the software and I expressed a different emotion with my animation.
There weren't many new things that I started this week or really made this week besides the punch animation that I am working on still. During this week I actually went back and refined a lot of things and watched them over a lot to make sure they looked good and there weren't any certain frames that really stuck out for being super out of place. For my animation "bop" I also drew in some lines on the final frames to make them look a lot less tacky and better overall. The bop animation is actually supposed to be a little creepy and was one of the 24 frames per second animations I've made so far. Bop wasn't a very scary animation but it does have the last little frame to try and jump scare people maybe. If the animations I made had sound then they would probably be more entertaining which I might try to figure out how to do in the future. So far everything that I've tried to figure out I have found some way to get it to work or at least get what I need from it. I actually looked over the dragon animation and its looking way better than I thought it would for not being finished yet. Its the longest project I'm making so far and I'm pretty proud of it even though its not completely done yet. Although the dragon animation is my favorite I am working on the punch one a lot more at the moment. The punch one is turning out really good as well and I actually got an arm movement that looks like an arm movement. I re-watched the animation and was surprised at how it looked because it looked good already. I've been thinking about this for a while but I'm probably going to up my weekly frames to about 200 or something around that as the normal 100 isn't really pushing me at all and I'm getting things done with almost minimal effort. The animations I've been making are still pretty good even though the 100 frames per week isn't that hard but 200 would really step up my progress. Also for the past maybe 3 weeks I forgot to publish the website so the previous blog posts may have not been available which is my fault.
During this week I completely changed my focus to another animation instead of the dragon one. The dragon animation has been getting tedious and I needed a week to just work on something else that I also wanted to work on. During this week I messed around a lot with the copy and pasting of frames and rotating them to help the animation look better. I finally figured out how to rotate certain parts of the frames instead of the whole thing. There is a ton of things to figure out with this software and I'm getting the hang of it by working with it. Usually I would google how to do this stuff but learning on my own really makes the process feel much more successful and meaningful. The middle number with the arrow that goes in a circle is how you rotate things. You have to select the part of the frame you want to rotate though which is probably what kept me from seeing it. During this week I started an animation of two people just standing around then the person on the right gets a smirk on its face and decides to punch the other one. The one on the right then winds up his punch and gets really buff (just because it looks nice and I wanted him to). I did most of the windup and everything but have yet to complete the actual punch. I also made a little effect when the guys arm gets really buff which was pretty easy and makes it look really cool. I'm also adding little blur effects so that motion looks better and more powerful, without the little lines then the movement wouldn't look as well in my opinion. Whenever the punch does happen I'm going to make it look like its in slow motion and really show the other guys face getting smashed in. After the slow motion part I'm going to make the guy fly away due to the force of the punch.
This week I worked on the dragon animation but I also made a whole new one. The new one that I made I used a fps of 25 which I'm not used to working with but I wanted to try it out. Using a higher fps has a lot of upsides and downsides, its faster and you can make more details but you also have to animate much more frames. I was just messing around with this fps so I just made a short animation, which was 75 frames long. Making this was a nice short little fun thing to do while also working on the dragon animation as well. This animation was mostly just for fun but I did a little with colors and actually learned some stuff about not having to put a ton of frames in-between things. If you want the animation to seem faster just put less frames but make the frames look more blurry, like they are blurred from motion. For the dragon animation though, I did some more frames for when the stick man was turning into the dragon which took a little while because they keep getting more detailed or less stick figureish. This animation I did was a lot different than the others I have made so far. This one was really fun to make and it went by really fast which surprised me. I made the face or head or whatever you would call it peel back to show a second face which was a little creepy. Then at the end of the animation it would flash a red background and the eyes would be a little creepy as well. I made lots of wrinkles whenever the skin was peeling back but I didn't do them on the last two frames of the peeling part. I also think I made the peeling part too long and used too many frames because it just feels slower than I had wanted it to be.
During this week I only worked on the stick man to dragon animation. This ones much more difficult than I had expected it to be but nonetheless it's still doable. I worked on getting more details into the hands and feet of the dragon which I hadn't even made yet. I also started using onion skin (its a feature where you can see other frames) on the dragon to make sure I was going in the right place animating it. I plan on making the dragon move eventually but first I have to get it to form all the way. Before I even worked on the last frames I was looking at some of the earlier ones and didn't really like them so I started redoing them. I added way too many details for the weird in-between parts of the stick man and the dragon so I decided to keep it simple and erase those. For the details on the last parts of the dragon I'll probably just add some wrinkles and claws as well as eyes and teeth. For the eyes I'm just going to make some big circles because that would be the most fitting. For the teeth I'm probably going to use some thicker lines than normal and make small ones because I tried thin lines before and I don't like how it looks. The earlier frames I made went from this To this The changes I made really just go with the style of the whole animation much better. I like to draw the simplistic things that look smoother and just overall much easier to handle for the eyes. Whenever I had tried to add details before it would always look pretty strange but I'm still getting the hang of it with this project. I am planning to do more complex and detailed animations and after messing around with the software I know how to make one a lot easier than drawing every frame the same. There is a way to select certain parts of the frames you have already drawn and basically copy paste them. I already use this to make the character stand still but I could also use it and move the copied pieces around so that it looks like its moving and doesn't look really weird.
During this week I didn't do much animating but I did a lot of research with the software I'm using. I was trying to figure out how to put my animation videos on you tube but the software has to get you to download another software so you can do that which I cannot do. I don't know how exactly I'm going to present the animations yet but I will eventually find some way. I might put them on a flash drive and present them that way which would be really easy. Otherwise if that doesn't work either I may try to download the other software and see if it works, if that doesn't work then I'll get some screen recording software and then record the animations. It was really a shock to me that you can't upload videos from opentoonz to you tube normally, usually most animation software has that option. During this week I worked on a couple character designs just like the one in the picture above. You can't exactly blend the colors so I had to get lots of different shades to make the drawings look better. The drawing on the left was more of a messing around version of the character if I choose to use it for a joke. Another thing I learned is that I can use different layers so that I don't go over the lines as much which makes the whole drawing process a lot easier in general. I would like to next week make a really nice and detailed drawing of a dragon or something to that effect. Speaking of dragons the animation that I worked on a lot last week I drew one of the end frames of what the dragon should look like and started working to that. Just now I have figured out that I should make key frames which are the frames that really matter. The frames in between the key frames don't have to look as good or as neat which saves a lot of time. I'm not doing really bad frames either I'm still working on those but I haven't been making them look as good as the key frames. Another thing I realized is that with this fps the transition of frames can be messy and still look pretty smooth. Throughout this process I've been learning a lot and it's been really fun even with the struggles. The most challenging thing I think is going to be animating my character that I made. I don't know what I want to do with the character yet but I'll eventually come up with something.
During this week I used my time not only to get my 80-100 frames done but also to figure out a lot more about opentoonz itself. I looked up some videos on how to copy frames as well as making different layers. For my second video I was making I decided to use a different style of animation from my first one which is where I draw a starting frame and an end frame, then I make a stretched version in-between them so they look like they are moving very nicely. I'm pretty sure this is called animation blurs or something like that. Due to the fact that I learned how to copy frames everything looks much much smoother compared to my last one, I'm still figuring out how to make different backgrounds but I am for sure getting there. I am planning to eventually put these videos on a youtube channel that I created so I can present them to my class at the end of the project but I have yet to figure that out. Its a good thing this software is popular because there are lots of tutorials on it and I make sure to take advantage of every one that I see. As you can see in the picture (kind of) I am mostly using stick figures to animate at first which is going pretty well for me as they don't have a ton of parts to them. This whole process is getting a lot easier just by doing it more and more and I think eventually I'll set maybe 150 frames per week. The animation process is much more fun and satisfying than I originally thought it would be, it is hard work but it's really easy to enjoy it and make it fun. As you can see this animation is already 102 frames long and its only about half way finished so I'm really excited to see how it turns out in the end. You'd think 100 frames would seem like a lot but it went by really fast and I had a great time doing it, I'm planning on turning this stick figure into a dragon and having it fly away at the end of this animation. After this I might work on someone running or someone getting punched, I find its more fun to animate cool things and it makes it go by much faster.
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Josh SainzThis is where I'll show my progress, my frustrations and my triumphs during this project. |