Hey guys, long time no see!
As some of you may know, I can’t draw. I can come up with something if it’s full profile or fas but if the object is in between then I’ll screw up proportions and perspective. One guy from France would say I am crazy and should use 3D software for this but nah… it’s too hard for me.
Here’s the animation: youtu.be/yaeSDXCtOX4
Early work! No textures or proper composition or other cool effects. Very minimalistic.
The above animation uses the following conceptions and implementations:
- Almost everything is an outline. Arms, legs, body, neck, tail are constructed solely from advanced outlines. Only complex parts such as eyes use 4-vertex regions. It gives you advantage of the perfect rotation joints.
- Tangents are evil. I avoid them because they can’t be transformed into semi-3D easily without producing artifacts. So any tangents are animated manually (morphing).
- Every joint has multiple rotations: general, 3D and IK. See the picture below. IK implemented using reverse rotation order. 3D rotation uses technique from 3D plane with some small additions.
- No bones. They just… don’t fit in very well. Introduce a lot of complication and gives little advantage.
Interesting thing, once you make a walking cycle in profile orientation you can set angle to 90 ang have fas oriented walk cycle. Although, during Z depth issue (1:15 time in the video), it looks ugly and always needs additional work.
Overall, the technique is so hard to make, that manual morphing is the choice. All values in this piece were converted by hand and jeez that was boring. Probably, it can be useful if I am able to script this… but dunno. I’ll continue my experiments.