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December 8, 2009
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:iconinkthinker:
Done back in April for Fates internal. It's a bit large so it might load slow at first. In full color with sound and light effects it's pretty wacky. I think I had some tweens assistance from Olsson, but I can't recall exactly and the damn tag's not filled out. I know I did keys and effects and a chunk of the tweens.

Even though I've done a couple dozen of 'em by now, I'm always kinda making it up as I go when I have to animate explosions. Because they rely on a lot of stuff happening very fast, there's a kind of randomness to the first few frames that's hard to explain, but if you don't get it right it wrecks the effect. After that part, it's just smoke and dust effects, which are a pain but not so hard.

I suspect that my obsession over tiny details like the casings flying towards the "camera" makes me a bad animator, at least by some measure. It's time-consuming (though not terribly in my opinion) and the frames only last a fraction of a second (literally), and I'm never sure anyone notices.

I did it all through the RvB Animated short, and I don't know if it made an impression on anyone (and I went to all the trouble of determining which guns ejected casings and which did not, too). One thing I did love about working on Halo content was the weapon effects. I love animating weapon effects, and Halo's got a lot of weapons.

I can stand seeing muzzle flashes repeated, but every time I see machine-gun animation that recycles the same single case-ejection frame sequence for every round, it stick in my teeth. For crying out loud, at least do three different ones and switch it up a bit! Five randoms is better, which is what I did here.

The problem is that while they're not that hard to animate, it represents a linear increase in the amount of work that has to be done by the paint and composite animators, which is miserable for them.

Loops and cycles are about saving work, but if the end result looks cheap, then is it worth the savings? Little tricks polish up the poopy parts. Like that shameless bit at the end that we cover up with the bullet holes, which offers a distraction from noticing that it's the same five damn drawings cycling back and forth. The bullet hole animation is pretty easy to do, though making it all tear and fall like a single piece of paper made it trickier.

Times like that are generally when I have fun. :D

©2009 Studio "Humouring the Fates", all rights reserved and so forth. Authoritah!
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:iconthe-wheeloftime:
Mood: Love ~The-WheelofTime Aug 29, 2012
It's so awesome!
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:icongemma09:
~gemma09 Oct 27, 2011
Sweeeettt ^_^
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:iconbaykustuyu:
~baykustuyu Mar 30, 2011  Professional Interface Designer
Nice scenes...
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:iconitiohs:
~Itiohs Mar 29, 2011
Amazing work =]
What software(s) did you use? Did you animate on paper first?
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:iconinkthinker:
*Inkthinker Mar 29, 2011  Professional Digital Artist
Thanks!

No, no paper anymore... we stopped using paper around 2006. The frames for this were drawn mostly in PS CS2 or CS3.

I had thought until recently that everyone was going paperless, but apparently I was wrong. I'm not sure why they're still animating to paper in Korea, where so much needs to be done so quickly, but I'm guessing it's a lot to do with tradition.
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:iconitiohs:
~Itiohs Mar 29, 2011
Maybe it's faster to clean up... I think.. but having to flip the pages continually and not being able to see the result immediately certainly makes it very time consuming...
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:iconinkthinker:
*Inkthinker Mar 29, 2011  Professional Digital Artist
Full-frame playback beats finger-flipping, in my book. And it can't be faster to clean up... pencil work on paper is messier than digital drawing in-system, and digital drawing doesn't create artifacts or smearing (unless you want it to). If you can avoid the entire scanning process you save time and energy, and the savings on overhead (paper, pencils, erasers) becomes quite significant over the long run.

There are downsides to conversion of course... the initial investment per-seat is hefty (the Cintiq alone costs 2K, and then you need a box and software which can easily cost another 2-3K) and there's a transitional period for the artist to adjust to... it took me about six months of steady, daily drawing on a tablet before I began to feel comfortable with the process.

But you gain access to an arsenal of drawing techniques that are impractical or impossible to perform with physical media, and over time you save a lot, so I'm still surprised when I see that production studios overseas haven't made the conversion yet.
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:iconitiohs:
Mood: Satisfied ~Itiohs Mar 30, 2011
They definitely should.
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:icongeschmack:
~geschmack Oct 3, 2010
Freaking sweet.
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:iconwhisperpntr:
Mood: Wow! ~whisperpntr Jan 22, 2010
I wonder if it's disturbing I feel this way daily at times minus the gun. Gosh I love your animations.
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