"Ebon: chapter 2, scene 4" - anime-style two-minute short

[Stuart Rogers]

Here is it, folks. Eight more seconds of action-packed "guy picking up an umbrella" footage.

Woo-hoo!

The umbrella is, of course, part of the Ebon model.

An interesting approach. Here's how I would have done it... I would make the umbrella an entirely separate object. For those scenes in which the umbrella stays in Ebon's back I would create an action with the umbrella as an Action Object. For any other scene I wouldn't use the Action, but add a separate umbrella to the Choreography and constrain it there. That way it would be no problem transferring the umbrella from one character to the other.

Once it lands on the floor, Monk needs to pick it up, so I switched his hand to IK and constrained the umbrella bone to his IK hand bone. That seemed to work well, but naturally as soon as I transitioned back to FK, the umbrella slipped away, so I ended up having to constrain the IK hand bone to the FK hand bone to allow for for proper FK animation.

Of course, if you'd used my (unreleased, ever-evolving, never-to-be-finished) rig, you would attach it to the geometry hand, which blends from IK to FK quite smoothly.

EDIT: I see you've just addressed that in reply to KenH.

The end result is what makes it all worthwhile, though. It totally looks like Monk is picking up that umbrella. He picks the hell up out of it. It was so worth the week I spent on this.

It looks good!

 

Things I like:

* The new 'acting'.

* The detail of the scar in the palm of his hand.

* The design of the room - the interaction of light and shade is particularly apparent in this shot.

 

Things I'm not so sure about:

* The sudden movement of the camera at the end. I realise you're trying to give a sense of sudden surprise from an "almost POV" shot, but I found it jarring. I wonder if keeping it moving slightly during the head shot might be better - I find accelerating from a slowly moving shot easier on the eye than from a static shot. YMMV of course!

 

One question: how long are those strides? He does seem to take a lot of steps to cover that distance.

 

This is really excellent work, and I look forward to the next clip.

[Zaryin]

I liked it, haha. That's about it. I didn't see anything wrong with the "almost POV" camera move.