[sfr]

Doesn't everybody love those "My First [whatever]!!!" posts? This is one, namely, my first animated 3d character.

I made this little clip recently for a (Finnish) video competition where the theme was "mobile precision location services" - quite inspiring eh..? (Basically it means mobile phones with GPS capabilities)

I spent about 8 days on this in total, I think. But most of that time went to modelling and shading, so I was left with not much time for the actual animating, and indeed the animation kind of stinks
The texts are in Finnish but they're not really interesting, if someone wants a translation I can give one though...

Anyway, that was the "bad animation ahead!" disclaimer, ignore it at your peril
Here's two download versions (the divx5 one has higher resolution):

avi, divx 5 (2500k)
quicktime 5 (1800k)

Software used was Softimage XSI.

Any comments are welcome, I certainly don't mind criticism since I'm a confessed character animation newbie

Saffron

[vurx]

you picked a hard one to animate, good job!

the hardest part is the bird taking off. one thing that new animators do is make their animations too slow, it looks like the bird is swimming rather than flying. he needs to really flap hard and fast to take off, even more so because he is a large bird.

to get it to look right is difficult at best. i would suggest looking at footage of birds taking off closely - frame by frame even - noticing how the action starts in the body and moves out through the bones and muscles and lastly the feathers.

your animation is a little awkward at the end (the flight part) but a really good first go.

-- Aaron

[sfr]

Yep, the takeoff looks embarassingly bad... Especially more so with some funny envelope tearing and alpha channel madness going on, but the clock was ticking and I had to press the render button

What you say about making movements too slow is very true - I think it's in part because people don't intrinsically have a very good frame of reference for fast movement. Everybody "feels" how long is 1 second compared to 3 seconds, but for 1 frame (1/25 s) compared to 3 frames, it's not so obvious. It's a matter of training oneself for that kind of acute perception, I guess. Very interesting anyway

Saffron

[Novacaptain]

For those of you that don't have the necessary software to view this, go to the
DIVX 5.0.2 download page or watch the quicktime version.

Anyways, it's pretty darn awesome...the bird taking off looks strange as mentioned it should probably flap its wings about ten times more in the same timeframe and i think these sort of birds make a running start too...not sure though.