Animation Feedback

Hi all! My strongest set of skills has never been art, be that modeling, animation or otherwise, so I’m primarily a scripter. As of recently though, I’ve been wanting to improve on these neglected skills (mostly animation) and wanted some feedback on some recent work to see what I’m doing incorrectly. I’d also be open to criticism on modelling and VFX, but its not what I’m focusing on ATM. Thank you for reading, and in advance, responding!!

A few things to note:

  1. I use the Moon Animator plugin
  2. I usually model with F3X

Clip 1:

Clip 2: (2x speed) (also forgot to mute mb)

Clip 3: (actually just an excuse to show off this loading screen bc i think its funny)

Apologies if this is too short to warrant its own topic, but I feel as if it is needed for my purposes. Let me know if I am wrong, though

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First of all, I think it’s great that you’re determined to develop more of your skills. A lot of people have an attitude like “oh I can’t do that, I just do this thing.” You seem to have more of an open mind about what you have yet to achieve and that’s a good attitude to have.

I think this is a great start for animation. I can tell what all the motions are, so I think the key frames are working but the pacing needs refinement. Right now everything is happening basically at the same speed (except the gun firing. That looks better). I would look at reference videos for similar motions and analyze how quickly to move between each pose.

The movements feel very linear or stiff as well. I’m not familiar with moon animator, but is there a way to ease the motion between frames rather than getting from pose a to pose b at a consistent speed? I think that could help give it appeal. You can always refer to the 12 principles of animation to add other enhancements to what you already have like anticipation and overshoot. For instance the gun firing could “bounce” more as it returns to its original position after firing.

Like I said, I think your broad strokes are there, it just needs some refinement!

Thank you for the reply!

There are ways to ease animations in Moon, but having played around with them for a while I haven’t noticed much of a difference, at least in terms of human movement. A lot of people use Moon and seem to have much better animations than me, so I’ll assume I’m just configuring them wrong. Thanks for the pointers, and I’ll work with interpolation settings more!:speaking_head::speaking_head:

Sure thing! Customizing the interpolation between keyframes is one of those things that only looks good if it’s applied with some rationale behind it so it takes practice and experimentation to get right. The key I think is to think through what effect you’re trying to achieve which is where reference videos come in handy. Analyze the motion and try to decipher when the action is speeding up or slowing down and then apply that to your rig and tinker with it until it looks “right”.

I just realized the gif I sent uploaded as an image. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this concept yet but just in case, here is a link to a pretty good overview of fundamental concepts for animation. These principles are useful in any field whether it’s motion design, 2D or 3D animation or UI motion. If you’re getting into animation, these are the fundamentals to build on.

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