Wednesday 18th December 2013

Animating

Today I began animating the beginning portion of my animation. This scene begins with the cat peacefully laying down in front of a house. At this point in the scene only the clouds are animated. The scene stays this way for a few seconds and then the cat begins to move as well. It is going to stretch and then get up and walk towards the pavement and then proceed to link into the walk cycle I have already created. However, animating the cat is proving to be increasingly difficult. I have a very limited amount of referencing for animating this cat so I am trying to work from still images of cats in similar poses and then guessing how the body looks in between frames. It is clear to me that I need to redo this part of the animation again after my first attempt as the cat does not move in a realistic way. In fact the cat instead looks like it is actually shape-shifting in a way.

Another problem I am facing is trying to keep the cats face to look the same throughout this animation. It's not a case of having the face look exactly the same, as in there is no change during the animation because that would not help make the animation better. Instead I need to maintain a similar expression as I draw the cat from a different angle. The more frames I draw the cat becomes less and less similar to the first frame. This may be the cause of why the cat just looks like it's shape-shifting to me rather than stretching but I think the main cause is just due to poor animation. When I retry the animation I also need to make sure I use a lot more frames. I think I used too little frames in this first attempt and more frames will, hopefully, give a smoother and more believable animation.

 The first image shows the starting position of the cat. I used the drawing I did a few weeks back as a template and redrew it into Flash. The second image is what the animations last frame ended up like. It's not the worst drawing but the animation in between does not work at all, however, that is not to say this was completely a waste of time. It was actually a worthwhile experience as now I know that I need to do a lot more drawings and maybe even a few more practices to get this bit of animation working.

This is a screenshot of all the frames used during this first attempt. There was only 9 keyframes in total which really was not enough.