Natural motions

[sonosublime]

Hi all,

I recently made a video, and I realise it highlights how bad I am at making natural, non-robotic motions:

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAwqtSJW7Fg&index=1&list=UUlO-g5PJD8o70zw7UTYoE-g[/media]

Are there any tips anyone can provide on making the characters look more natural, and less like robots? I was going to try and use puppet motion to give them the idle breathing animations of existing SFM characters, but is there anything else I could do?

[noh_mercy]

When ever I need help w/ fluid animating, I look at cartoons and movie scenes that almost match the scene I'm trying to animate and pretty much 'rotoscope' it. Its like 'tracing' but for animation. It also helps me appreciate even more the hard work professionals put into their cartoons.

also use the motion editor for smoothing out animation, it works a lot better[easier] for smoothing than the graph editor, smooth out sharp curves.

The reason why your animation looks so robotic, is because you have all the motion coming one after the another, like a line with parts of a scene waiting for their turn to move. Idk how to explain this, but you need to have motion at all different times, the opposite of having everything in single file, watch a looney toons animation frame by frame and you'll see a bunch of parts motion happening at all different times, but in the right way. The real challenge is imagining how it should be and matching you animation to what you imagine.

Also correct me if im wrong, but I dont think ur using IK rigs, which makes things a LOT harder. When animating with IK rigs, posing is easy like in gmod, I can move a hand, and the entire arm and elbow moves and rotates with respect to it. Without rigs, you need to animate each part of that arm separately requiring a pretty powerful imagination to animate realistically.

Without rigs for example, if I only wanted to move an elbow, everything after the elbow moves along with it. so by moving the elbow, I would throw off the position of the hand, which is time consuming to put back in its original position.

[sonosublime]

Thanks for the reply. I am using IK rigs, but what you say makes sense. It's just really hard to imagine how all the different parts of the body would move at different times.

[TeeRave]

[QUOTE=sonosublime;45551985]Thanks for the reply. I am using IK rigs, but what you say makes sense. It's just really hard to imagine how all the different parts of the body would move at different times.[/QUOTE]
Read up Animator's survival kit, and think of characters as a whole. You'll get the feeling of how weight can be imitated over time and experience gained in it.