Welcome to the world of animation, is tedious and time consuming but it can be "fun" and seeing the finished product and seeing how peeps react is just satisfying.
Plan as much of the animation as you can before you even touch your computer. Video reference, thumbnails etc. The more knowledgeable you are going into creating the scene, the less time you'll waste when producing the animation. Best of luck man!
Hi there! I know I'm late to reply to this, but what are things should plan besides video references and thumbnails? What else that follows that "etc"? Also, while we're on the topic, how did you learn animation? And what specific resources and video tutorials you recommend people like me who's new and is interested in delving into animation themselves should we go for?
Animation isn't something only a select few people can do man. I wouldn't say I had a knack for it. It's just one of those things that you learn over time providing you stick with it and remain critical of what you do.
...wat? That blocking pass 1 is essentially what I'd just call "99% complete, activate Smoother and upload!" I definitely rely a bit too much on tweening...
CinemaTeamFortress Andy Griffith. He was the main character on the Andy Griffith show and was overall a genuine guy. The Andy Griffith show was just one of those classics that you watched with your day when you were 5 years old
A lot of people forget how important it is to block out your animation before you start animating. Straight forward animation can work but it's a lot more chaotic when you want to change something.
not good enough?!? mate this is beyond pixar level of animation! and that takes a whole army of animaters to make it look good to that standered.... the guys at pixar should be begging to work for you!! please may you do a full run through of how you make these god-like shorts? like start to finish kinda thing? it would be mighty handy for all of us, im sure! :D
Your shoulders oppose your hips! If you make a very exaggerated walk across the room, and look down at your body, you'll notice that whatever shoulder is pointing forward, the opposing hip joint sticks forward too! It's the same situation for which shoulder is raised. A simple way to think of it, whatever the left hip does, the right shoulder mirrors it. Hope this helps.
adding ta my "come back later when in panic and or stuck" list. this will certainly help for the end part of my first animation, later. thank you very much for having uploaded this no matter how long ago.
u know at first i thought this video was boring, but seeing all the stages to make that short conversation between engie and sniper, i was really impressed and interested. many people create action scenes that look like crap, but u made the conversation seem...REAL. keep up the good work, me and many others admire it!
Not good enough?!?! Your animation is smooth as hell, down to every detail! I don't think I would be able to master your level of skill anywhere in my lifetime. You're an excellent animator, and I hope this can bring you happiness in your life.
I really enjoy this channel, this is probably the only SFM channel that I've subscribed to because your animations are so fluid and you actually don't mind putting your work in the description to download it. I'm still learning to make my sfm animations better. Thank you, bro, you rock and keep up the good work. :)
Pretty much! Like in stop motion animation and 2d, blocking is where you work on individual frames and create the poses, using stepped tangents. Then when you're happy with the blocking stage, you switch to spline tangents. From then on you're working with the computer correcting tangents and so on.
Nice to hear! And nah I didn't XD Since it was Christmas time, I was working way too casually to have it completed in time. I've seen one or two 11secondclub entries use sfm (I think in November the animation in 5th place was made using sfm) , still a very small number of people within the community. With the number of characters and environments available in sfm though, I wouldn't be surprised to see a rise in sfm entries.
It depends on the movement. With a walk, roughly you want a full cycle (left step then right step returning to original pose) to take place over one second, so in 24fps you can just about get away with creating a pose on every 3 frames (ideally create a pose on every 4th frame and then go back and create a pose inbetween those frames). The more poses you create the more fleshed out the movement will be, so the idea is have more poses close together during action nd far part during subtle movemen
Lip sync was done manually. I created a camera, locked it to the characters face and then used a mirror to aid me. The phonemes already attached to the rigs are a great base to work from.
Spline is the name given to the tangent type in the graph editor. Spline will interpolate curves between every key you make, allowing for a nice smooth movement!
Oh wow, this was incredible. Up until the end I really thought I might be about to be this good, but 70 hours, I have only spent 140 hours IN SFM in total. Time to get back to the drawing board :p
In the graph editor, you need to be creating key frames with stepped tangents. To do this, in the graph editor, go to the drop down menu for "keymode" and select stepped from the list.
I think it's from the Andy Griffith show. I heard it first on 11secondclub's December competition and haven't seen an awful lot of AGS, so I can't say for sure.
Murraythis, Thanks, I really need loads of help with animation specifically walking. I'm guessing this is straight ahead, you just reminded me once again to do blocking! I keep forgetting it helps so much. This animation is so good, I love the little touches of expression. Thanks again
Best practice is to practice. Just keep animating. Be critical of yourself, and watch animation that inspires you. One thing that helped me is looking through "animation workflows". Just google that term or youtube it and you'll get tons of results. Watch how the people who inspire you animate, and replicate it. Best of luck dude.
and follow through. Usually on my first pass, I'll have a poses 2-6 frames apart. You should be more concious as to a where a pose is needed in the movement, as opposed to how often to set a key frame. Knowing where to pose the character is something you learn over time I'm afraid to say. The more you animate the more aware you become when creating a scene. If you want better examples of the stages to animation, type "animation progress reel" into yt search. I hope this helps.
On and off for a few years. I think I made my first animations in microsoft powerpoint when I was about 11 or 12. It's only in the past year have I taken animation seriously. I'm at that age now where having a full time job is probably a good idea XD
In the graph editor, set tangents to stepped. During this step you're thinking strictly about the extreme poses (for example spiderman right at the end of his swing, about to shoot another web), and ideally the movements between those extremes.
The root control should only be used to position the character in the world! To move the character during a walk or any other movement, you use the pelvis control and then animate each limb separately.
I wanted to focus more on the animation workflow than the razzmatazz behind lighting and effects. If you're keen to learn more in that area, I'd recommend looking up a youtube user called Zachariah Scott. He's made some great tutorials in those areas!
Hey Soupy! The Natural Motion forums are the forums for discussing and sharing work created in endorphin. Endorphin was the first 3d program I used. Much different to anything like Maya. Worth checking out!
Great job, I got source filmmaker a while ago and I don't know how to use it at all. This shows me how long of a process it takes to make a great quality video. Thank you and great job. P.S. Where is that voice clip from?
Google 'Muybridge walk' . Recreate those poses and then think about the timing between each frame. That'll give you a base to work with. Improving on it will be a matter of learning about principles of animation and testing those ideas on the base you've created for yourself.
This was produced in Source Filmmaker. Before Source Filmmaker I ventured into programming for about year and a half, so I would guess I've spent about 2 with Maya.
Wow, this is really awesome dude! How are you not working for valve!? The animation in this is so elegant and smooth, all the body movements are clearly correct and well, just everything about it is perfect! Hopefully you make more! Plus, NEW SUBBER!!! :D
Ahhh cool :-). Yeah I've been on the lookout for some decent animation forums. Places like Polycount are cool, but it's been hard to find ones that are more animation focused.
Thanks so much for this man, It really helps to see your process. Did you wind up submitting this? I had been wondering when I would see an SFM entry to 11 second club.
Currently, I start by thumb-nailing on paper the extremes, these being the poses the most important gestures in the scene (usually about 5-20 frames apart). Once I have the scene on paper, I start blocking them in, however, as well as blocking in the extremes I've drawn, I'll block in a few more poses along the way in order to establish the mechanics of the character; a shift in weight, change in head direction. These also allow me to start establishing principles such as squash and stretch...
I can't quite remember if this is 30fps or 24fps; went through a little stint of experimenting with 30fps earlier this year. I would recommend 24fps personally. I think we're trained to see 24fps when watching film, so anything higher can be distracting without offering much else in the way of positives.
i totally agree with you, but i probably didn't explain clearly enough. after you do the rough splining, with keyframes and all, i thought that using the round preset(i don't know how to exactly explain how it works, but there's a demonstration in a jimer lins' video) as final splining would have been quite useful.
Aside from occasional ad revenue I don't get paid for this no. I work in retail stacking shelves. Animation is what I've picked up and enjoyed doing in my spare time, and thanks to source filmmaker it's possible to put that towards creating short films without the expense of buying models and such. It's luck whether or not I can actually make a career of it one day (I still don't think I'm anywhere near good enough though), so In the mean time I'll be continuing to make shorts for you guys!
Practice and patience dude! Everyone starts out terrible. You just need the drive to keep working, and the ability to look at you work critically and consider where you need to improve. Above all, enjoy it. If you're looking for a great place to start off, I'd recommend Digital Tutors. They have a great beginners course for both Maya and 3ds Max, which you can download for free, for educational purposes.
Thank you man very helpful to see the flow and thinking behind an animation from start to finish. 70 hours though man thats intense! Amazing animation though Pixar movie quality!
After I rendered the staging scene, I deleted all the keys and started from scratch. The Staging scene was purely to create a video to get the idea from my head and onto the screen, and act as a reference as I created the animation.
Oh my god 70 hours ?? That's some serious work.
Welcome to the world of animation, is tedious and time consuming but it can be "fun" and seeing the finished product and seeing how peeps react is just satisfying.
@@ironthekid Yeah it took like 5 hours for 8 no 9 seconds of animation one time
this conversation was stuck in my head for over 2 days
Plan as much of the animation as you can before you even touch your computer. Video reference, thumbnails etc. The more knowledgeable you are going into creating the scene, the less time you'll waste when producing the animation. Best of luck man!
Hi there! I know I'm late to reply to this, but what are things should plan besides video references and thumbnails? What else that follows that "etc"?
Also, while we're on the topic, how did you learn animation? And what specific resources and video tutorials you recommend people like me who's new and is interested in delving into animation themselves should we go for?
what do you mean by 3 stages? I need do 100 of renders for find better look?
Animation isn't something only a select few people can do man. I wouldn't say I had a knack for it. It's just one of those things that you learn over time providing you stick with it and remain critical of what you do.
...wat? That blocking pass 1 is essentially what I'd just call "99% complete, activate Smoother and upload!" I definitely rely a bit too much on tweening...
I wish you would make more educational vids. :(
Look where you are now, making amazing animations!!!
Rest in peace Andy
Who was andy?
CinemaTeamFortress Andy Griffith. He was the main character on the Andy Griffith show and was overall a genuine guy. The Andy Griffith show was just one of those classics that you watched with your day when you were 5 years old
TF2 and the Andy Griffith Show together is probably one of the best things to ever happen.
Matlock Audio! Rest In Peace Andy Griffith.
Its happy to see that animations take a lot of time.
It make me motivating to continue.
this is 1 week straight for 11 seconds, but it was totally worth it
Two days. 70 hours is not an entire week.
3 days @@diddlypoop
Animation doesn't have to be hard; It's just takes a lot of time and dedication.
A lot of people forget how important it is to block out your animation before you start animating. Straight forward animation can work but it's a lot more chaotic when you want to change something.
not good enough?!? mate this is beyond pixar level of animation! and that takes a whole army of animaters to make it look good to that standered.... the guys at pixar should be begging to work for you!! please may you do a full run through of how you make these god-like shorts? like start to finish kinda thing? it would be mighty handy for all of us, im sure! :D
why was I recommended this 11 years later
Ha, it does mean a lot man, and thanks for the kind words.
Your shoulders oppose your hips! If you make a very exaggerated walk across the room, and look down at your body, you'll notice that whatever shoulder is pointing forward, the opposing hip joint sticks forward too! It's the same situation for which shoulder is raised. A simple way to think of it, whatever the left hip does, the right shoulder mirrors it. Hope this helps.
Your rendering is awesome I dead ass thought this was blender for a second
Using an Andy Griffith Show clip for this actually fit incredibly well for the engie and sniper.
MaxofS2D might have the nicest looking films, but you definitely have the smoothest animations.
The new shining star of SFM... beware, Max.
omg the sniper's animation reminds me of toy story
great job, holy shit
adding ta my "come back later when in panic and or stuck" list.
this will certainly help for the end part of my first animation, later. thank you very much for having uploaded this no matter how long ago.
Thank you for taking the time to watch!
Engi's walk cycle is so natural and lovely.Well done! :D -animation student
u know at first i thought this video was boring, but seeing all the stages to make that short conversation between engie and sniper, i was really impressed and interested. many people create action scenes that look like crap, but u made the conversation seem...REAL. keep up the good work, me and many others admire it!
Thought this was a subtle way of telling everyone you're going back to Shards XD
As a student of animation this was really helpful, the blocking was something that really never occurred to me.
max points more at astounding tricks people can't wrap their head around rather than anything else.
Not good enough?!?!
Your animation is smooth as hell, down to every detail! I don't think I would be able to master your level of skill anywhere in my lifetime. You're an excellent animator, and I hope this can bring you happiness in your life.
“I thought you just meant dyin’!”
I really enjoy this channel, this is probably the only SFM channel that I've subscribed to because your animations are so fluid and you actually don't mind putting your work in the description to download it. I'm still learning to make my sfm animations better. Thank you, bro, you rock and keep up the good work. :)
Pretty much! Like in stop motion animation and 2d, blocking is where you work on individual frames and create the poses, using stepped tangents. Then when you're happy with the blocking stage, you switch to spline tangents. From then on you're working with the computer correcting tangents and so on.
I honestly love this. Animation is a wonderful thing.
Seventy hours? It shows. Amazing work.
Nice to hear! And nah I didn't XD Since it was Christmas time, I was working way too casually to have it completed in time. I've seen one or two 11secondclub entries use sfm (I think in November the animation in 5th place was made using sfm) , still a very small number of people within the community. With the number of characters and environments available in sfm though, I wouldn't be surprised to see a rise in sfm entries.
You're too good at this dude.
This looks like something I could come back to if I was struggling with animation on SFM.
Definitely adding this to my watch list! :D
Oh... Lord... I love this video.
It depends on the movement. With a walk, roughly you want a full cycle (left step then right step returning to original pose) to take place over one second, so in 24fps you can just about get away with creating a pose on every 3 frames (ideally create a pose on every 4th frame and then go back and create a pose inbetween those frames). The more poses you create the more fleshed out the movement will be, so the idea is have more poses close together during action nd far part during subtle movemen
70 HOURS of work for a 11 second video. i love the animation and stuff though
dude i love your videos so smooth
animation time well spent
Lip sync was done manually. I created a camera, locked it to the characters face and then used a mirror to aid me. The phonemes already attached to the rigs are a great base to work from.
It's like a big old Naturalmotion reunion
Spline is the name given to the tangent type in the graph editor. Spline will interpolate curves between every key you make, allowing for a nice smooth movement!
11 second video from SFM = 70 hours of work.
I really like this, and I love how it shows all of what you do.
Loving this! You manage to get a great sense of timing even when using stepped tangents. Very, very nice!
Oh wow, this was incredible. Up until the end I really thought I might be about to be this good, but 70 hours, I have only spent 140 hours IN SFM in total. Time to get back to the drawing board :p
What an inspiration you are to me! i love your animation. The acting is wonderful!
funny how that my animations only take about a day to make,
fooking shait animationz that is.
Yep, for the December contest. They got some really nice entries, as per usual XD
In the graph editor, you need to be creating key frames with stepped tangents. To do this, in the graph editor, go to the drop down menu for "keymode" and select stepped from the list.
Dude...you need to make a movie. An hour long movie.
I think it's from the Andy Griffith show. I heard it first on 11secondclub's December competition and haven't seen an awful lot of AGS, so I can't say for sure.
This looks great. I really need to get into SFM. Nice work, mate.
That was pretty darn cool!
70 hours. Holy shit. They were 70 hours very well spent though, thank you for the video, found it very interesting.
Murraythis, Thanks, I really need loads of help with animation specifically walking. I'm guessing this is straight ahead, you just reminded me once again to do blocking! I keep forgetting it helps so much. This animation is so good, I love the little touches of expression. Thanks again
Best practice is to practice. Just keep animating. Be critical of yourself, and watch animation that inspires you. One thing that helped me is looking through "animation workflows". Just google that term or youtube it and you'll get tons of results. Watch how the people who inspire you animate, and replicate it. Best of luck dude.
Awesome! I love your animation so much.
and follow through. Usually on my first pass, I'll have a poses 2-6 frames apart. You should be more concious as to a where a pose is needed in the movement, as opposed to how often to set a key frame. Knowing where to pose the character is something you learn over time I'm afraid to say. The more you animate the more aware you become when creating a scene. If you want better examples of the stages to animation, type "animation progress reel" into yt search. I hope this helps.
This was more useful than you'd even think! Thanks!
Nice work man. So many damn hours!
On and off for a few years. I think I made my first animations in microsoft powerpoint when I was about 11 or 12. It's only in the past year have I taken animation seriously. I'm at that age now where having a full time job is probably a good idea XD
holy crap this looks new but its actually 8 years old oh my god
In the graph editor, set tangents to stepped. During this step you're thinking strictly about the extreme poses (for example spiderman right at the end of his swing, about to shoot another web), and ideally the movements between those extremes.
Oh, that's what splining does.
I occasionally use the phenoms but often when I do I find myself tweaking them anyway. They're a good base to work from.
The root control should only be used to position the character in the world! To move the character during a walk or any other movement, you use the pelvis control and then animate each limb separately.
I wanted to focus more on the animation workflow than the razzmatazz behind lighting and effects. If you're keen to learn more in that area, I'd recommend looking up a youtube user called Zachariah Scott. He's made some great tutorials in those areas!
Hey Soupy! The Natural Motion forums are the forums for discussing and sharing work created in endorphin. Endorphin was the first 3d program I used. Much different to anything like Maya. Worth checking out!
By the e way best animation I ever and I MEAN EVER great job!!!!
Great job, I got source filmmaker a while ago and I don't know how to use it at all. This shows me how long of a process it takes to make a great quality video. Thank you and great job. P.S. Where is that voice clip from?
Google 'Muybridge walk' . Recreate those poses and then think about the timing between each frame. That'll give you a base to work with. Improving on it will be a matter of learning about principles of animation and testing those ideas on the base you've created for yourself.
I wish I could work out how to do walking animation. It's getting the feet to stick to the ground that I can't do.
This was produced in Source Filmmaker. Before Source Filmmaker I ventured into programming for about year and a half, so I would guess I've spent about 2 with Maya.
Great tutorial!
Have you considered perfection?
Wow, this is really awesome dude! How are you not working for valve!? The animation in this is so elegant and smooth, all the body movements are clearly correct and well, just everything about it is perfect! Hopefully you make more! Plus, NEW SUBBER!!! :D
Wait wait wait... 70 hours for dat !!! Respect
0:12 I don't know why, but I like this most
Ahhh cool :-). Yeah I've been on the lookout for some decent animation forums. Places like Polycount are cool, but it's been hard to find ones that are more animation focused.
With this talent you could 'prolly work for Pixar...
Thanks so much for this man, It really helps to see your process. Did you wind up submitting this? I had been wondering when I would see an SFM entry to 11 second club.
Currently, I start by thumb-nailing on paper the extremes, these being the poses the most important gestures in the scene (usually about 5-20 frames apart). Once I have the scene on paper, I start blocking them in, however, as well as blocking in the extremes I've drawn, I'll block in a few more poses along the way in order to establish the mechanics of the character; a shift in weight, change in head direction. These also allow me to start establishing principles such as squash and stretch...
I can't quite remember if this is 30fps or 24fps; went through a little stint of experimenting with 30fps earlier this year. I would recommend 24fps personally. I think we're trained to see 24fps when watching film, so anything higher can be distracting without offering much else in the way of positives.
i totally agree with you, but i probably didn't explain clearly enough.
after you do the rough splining, with keyframes and all, i thought that using the round preset(i don't know how to exactly explain how it works, but there's a demonstration in a jimer lins' video) as final splining would have been quite useful.
One thing, a lot of people do with tutorials, is simply record what they are doing, and describe it.
Aside from occasional ad revenue I don't get paid for this no. I work in retail stacking shelves. Animation is what I've picked up and enjoyed doing in my spare time, and thanks to source filmmaker it's possible to put that towards creating short films without the expense of buying models and such. It's luck whether or not I can actually make a career of it one day (I still don't think I'm anywhere near good enough though), so In the mean time I'll be continuing to make shorts for you guys!
Practice and patience dude! Everyone starts out terrible. You just need the drive to keep working, and the ability to look at you work critically and consider where you need to improve. Above all, enjoy it. If you're looking for a great place to start off, I'd recommend Digital Tutors. They have a great beginners course for both Maya and 3ds Max, which you can download for free, for educational purposes.
Very great work. Bravo !
You are amazing!
Tutorials, practice, and then more practice :D
Murray! I bet you don't even remember who I am... but brilliant stuff man!
Damn good animation.
Thank you man very helpful to see the flow and thinking behind an animation from start to finish. 70 hours though man thats intense! Amazing animation though Pixar movie quality!
Wew, Looking both of this and the SFM Pose to Pose Animation, hope this will end well! ^-^
Respect dude
After I rendered the staging scene, I deleted all the keys and started from scratch. The Staging scene was purely to create a video to get the idea from my head and onto the screen, and act as a reference as I created the animation.
Wow, amazing work :)