Tail Overlap

It has been a lot of days since my last post and here is why: after having finished the pendulum animation, I attempted the ball with a tail animation and I just couldn't get it right. The rig I had didn't help much, it complicated things more and it was hard to focus only on the overlap. I made like 2 tests and they were horrible.

Then I decided to move on to a walk cycle. I spent a whole day reading some tutorials and books until I understood very clearly what each part of the body did. The following day I made my first try and the blocking looked quite good, but when I began to polish it I ran into a problem. I was having the hips move in some nice arcs and the spacing was good, and I did the same with the feet. The problem was that the knees were going crazy, and I didn't know how to fix it. If I changed the curves of the hips and feet to fix the knee pops, the hips and feet would look bad. After a few more tries I got really tired of it and decided I would try it again some other day.

After being insisted upon like 100 times by Tony Chau and Reed Arneson, I went back to the ball with a tail animation. BUT! This time it would be different, they told me to animate the ball jumping around and then draw the tail on top on Flipbook. After like 3 attempts I finally managed to get it looking quite good. I still don't like how the tail looks when it squashes before the jump. My next animation will probably be an animation of the tail in Maya.



TIPS! Today I thought that I could add a tip at the end of each post of something very important I learned on each animation. So, lets check some useful stuff when it comes to animating a ball with a tail.

1º - Choose if you will animate a BALL with a tail or an ANIMAL with a tail. The difference on how they jump is huge, the rotations are the total opposite.

Here is how the rotations would look if you were animating a bouncing ball that was alive and could move by its own:

 

But notice how the rotations change if you are animating an animal running, for example a squirrel. The rotations are the opposite since the animals land with their front paws, not their back!

If you are animating a ball, I suggest that you leave that white ring in the middle so you can see the rotations, they look quite good on the ball. On the other hand, if you are making an animal, I'd hide the white ring because it looks much better without it when you play it.

Extra Tip: Don't have the part where the tail is attachd to the ball bend up too much and remember to have the tip of the tail pointing towards where it came from, ALWAYS! A big thanks for Tony Chau for being patient enough to teach me all this stuff!



Thanks for Reading!


Jero