Shot 55 camera synchronization

Making animatic for shot 56 in Pencil

Meanwhile, Nikolay Mamashev is back to the project for the whole summer. He is working hard on animation for shot 16. This is a real crusade, really boring work. Shot 16 showing soldiers’ foots running towards us.

Nikolay takes 3D animatic and making some kind of vector overpaint.  First, he have sketched few keyframes to get the idea about the image look. Then he traced them and animated using stickman template. He decided not to draw sketches for all the rest keyframes and continued tracing using the past keyframes and 3D image as references. Looks like this approach works out. 4 seconds, 4 soldiers, 8 legs = lot of work. Though, Synfig simplifies work very much – we don’t have to  trace EACH frame. The animation is estimated as 20% done and the uncompressed file size is already at 25 Mb…

Working on shot 16

Next. I have discovered awesome resource – http://www.blendswap.com/. There is a lot  high quality 3D models there, all under friendly CC license! We already got drumset model and there’s so much more to consider (just look at all these car models!). Of course, we don’t forget to contribute back. ^__^

Also, recently I have discovered that “Donate” button on this website isn’t working. The reason is simple -  accounts registered for the citizens of Russia can’t receive  the payments. I guess this is why the amount of collected donations is zero (though, maybe I’m mistaken ^___^). Anyway, I should have find some workaround for this issue if we want to accept payments someday.

That’s all news for the moment. Stay tuned!

Download ogg-video: slowmo.ogv.

You can examine animation sources here. Animation have complex structure and splitted into parts – each character in separate file. All parts have normal timing and composed together in the 20-3.sif file (you see it in the first part of the video). SlowMo effect is applied in 20.sif file by importing 20-3.sif into it and changing the TimeOffset property.

Stickman video

During the drawing of keyframes for scene 20 we decided to concertize the motion of Ivan by using stickman. Generally, making stickman in Synfig is a simple task, but this one – with forward kinematic.

We made two videos about the process. First video is about finishing making stickman in Synfig Studio – only one hand left, and the head. Next one is about animating the top part of the stickman, Legs are already set up, animating the rest.

Sorry about the files size, but on YouTube those videos look just awful.

EDIT: There is a simpler approach of making stickman exists – without the need to use Radial Composite Converts and Rotate layers. Anyway, here’s two synfig stickman templates: stickman.sifz and stickman-simple.sifz. Enjoy!

The original 6 positions of human figure were drawn in Pencil. That allows us to set timing properly and to get the idea of the motion in general. Then we imported keyframes in Synfig Studio and created smooth motion.

Now, when we ensured what animation is looks smooth enough we could proceed with redraw of original 6 keyframes in detail.