Advice please!

[ScottishHobson]

Hi everyone,

This is my first time posting on Newgrounds, so nice to meet you all! It's also my first time animating anything, pretty much ever, so I'd love your opinion on this shot-for-shot remake I did of an HTC advert with Emeli Sande and Naughty Boy.

Any advice you could give me on animation techniques would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

- Alex

[BabySteps]

how long did this take you? it's flipping awesome!

did you take classes?

[ExtraordinaryTerrest]

It's pretty good. The animations are just a little stiff though, and the lighting on the heavy is a bit weird. Overall I think you did a great job. The volumetric lighting looks great, and the lighting on the coach is well done as well. I think whenever the heavy goes "ohh oooh ohh" his neck sticks out too far. I think you could take care of the strange lighting on the heavy just by focusing on lighting him from above, as too leave some shadowing on the face/neck.

I've been working on some SFM stuff myself. Where did you get that theater map?

[ScottishHobson]

At 2/27/13 08:49 PM, BabySteps wrote: how long did this take you? it's flipping awesome!

did you take classes?

Thankyou! It took almost exactly 100 hours. I've never had classes or tried to animate any models before. I do use a lot of NLE programs like Premiere Pro for my work, so I'm familiar with keyframing, which definitely helped a lot!

[ScottishHobson]

At 2/28/13 07:39 PM, ExtraordinaryTerrest wrote: It's pretty good. The animations are just a little stiff though, and the lighting on the heavy is a bit weird. Overall I think you did a great job. The volumetric lighting looks great, and the lighting on the coach is well done as well. I think whenever the heavy goes "ohh oooh ohh" his neck sticks out too far. I think you could take care of the strange lighting on the heavy just by focusing on lighting him from above, as too leave some shadowing on the face/neck.

I've been working on some SFM stuff myself. Where did you get that theater map?

Thanks! I agree, after watching it back I think some of the animations could definitely be smoothed out a bit. I tried to replicate the lighting from the original video by placing lights in the same place as they did in the real shoot - they had a big HMI backlighting the musician and then what I think were a couple of 2ks being reflected from a silk frame for fill on the closer shots. They also used that massive stage light you see as a top light, although I moved that around a lot in the different shots.

In SFM, materials don't reflect the same way they would in real life (not to take away from how completely awesome and powerful the lighting options are) so I had to try and just alter the properties of the light to try and recreate it.. instead of trying to make it look better I got too focused on putting the lights where I thought they were in the original, if that makes sense? So yeah, I will definitely be tweaking that or at least keeping it in mind for future videos!

Thanks for the input, really appreciated :)

[ScottishHobson]

At 2/28/13 07:39 PM, ExtraordinaryTerrest wrote: It's pretty good. The animations are just a little stiff though, and the lighting on the heavy is a bit weird. Overall I think you did a great job. The volumetric lighting looks great, and the lighting on the coach is well done as well. I think whenever the heavy goes "ohh oooh ohh" his neck sticks out too far. I think you could take care of the strange lighting on the heavy just by focusing on lighting him from above, as too leave some shadowing on the face/neck.

I've been working on some SFM stuff myself. Where did you get that theater map?

Sorry, forgot to say - the theater map can be found here http://www.garrysmod.org/downloads/?a=view&id=107785

Thanks!

[ExtraordinaryTerrest]

At 3/1/13 11:00 AM, ScottishHobson wrote:

At 2/28/13 07:39 PM, ExtraordinaryTerrest wrote: It's pretty good. The animations are just a little stiff though, and the lighting on the heavy is a bit weird. Overall I think you did a great job. The volumetric lighting looks great, and the lighting on the coach is well done as well. I think whenever the heavy goes "ohh oooh ohh" his neck sticks out too far. I think you could take care of the strange lighting on the heavy just by focusing on lighting him from above, as too leave some shadowing on the face/neck.

I've been working on some SFM stuff myself. Where did you get that theater map?

Sorry, forgot to say - the theater map can be found here http://www.garrysmod.org/downloads/?a=view&id=107785

Thanks!

Thanks for the link man. I'll be able to use that. I actually needed a theater stage for a sketch I'm working on, but I didn't have that link at the time, so I built a stage lol.