Standing Long Jump Animation

My animation college instructor gave us an animation assignment this week where we have to animate a man jumping from a standing position. The process we have to go through to make the animation is: 1) Draw out thumbnail sketches, 2) create a flipbook of the rough animation, 3) create a blocked out version of the real animation, and 4) create the final animation. Since I used the same sketches in my thumbnails for the flipbook, I won't bother putting them up.

Here's the flipbook:
(The video won't play on YWS, you have to click on the picture to see the real thing.)


I'm not so much posting this for cretiques, but they are certainly welcome. I just thought you guys might be interested in seeing what creating a professional animation is like.

Haha. That was cool! The man jumped funny! He also looks a bit funny, but thats just a basic person sketch right? It would be more funny if you make it more cartoon-y. Sorry, not much of a review. *bursts out laughing* That was awesome!
~Storm

I liked it, but it was very plain and boring. Perhaps add a background and/or color? Plus the land was a bit awkward with the scrawny legs. But otherwise it was pretty great. Nice angle. It was comic/cartoony, I liked it. Bravo!

-Colt

Hey Dynamo!

This is actually really cool! The simplicity of this is perfect, and you've done a great job here. This must have taken a while to perfect . It's incredible; great work on the whole thing.

June

Here's the next step in making an animation, the blocked out version. This is meant to assess your animation to see if everything looks all right. If it does, then you can go on to making the final animation.



(The programs I used to make this two second video are Autodesk 3D Studios Max 2009 and Adobe After Effects CS4)

And here's the final version, smoothened out and ready for submition. Some of you might be thinking, "It must have been easy to make a two second long animation." ...Don't make me slap you. Drawing out the animation on paper took a good 4 hours to finish, and so did the computer portion as well. This animation alone is 60 frames long, 20 of which I had to position myself. This little two second video took me a good 8 hours in total to finish.

Good thing I don't plan on going into character animation as a profession. I plan on becoming a 3D modeler or concept artist.

This is cool! I enjoyed seeing the different steps. This isn't a critique really

I understand about how long it takes, my brother does Computer Games Design at university. He is forever telling me how difficult it is lol

He shows me his concept sketches and quick animations that he does. It is quite an interesting profession. Do you study it?

It's funny because my brother was doing a module on like different textures and stuff. We went out for the day and he had a camera and was wandering around, taking photos of like the floor or a wall or a brick haha!

Thanks for sharing!

Bex x

That's amazing, looks very realistic.

Are you going to continue this such that it looks like a person? If the answer is yes I'd love to see it.

I'm still amazed at how much it looks like a person jumping.

Thanks for the compliments, but no, I'm not going to go any further than what I have. The assignment was to make the model jump from one spot to another. Making the actual model itself look human is for a different class. Everyone recieved the same character rig to work with, and tampering it in anyway could make it break.

But if you're interested I'm starting on a different animation which is going to be a walk cycle.