Stopmo Style

[Rodney]

Here's a quick test of a stop motion approach to animating that uses... no animation... just different (instances of) the same models.

(Those instances can then of course be adjusted/animated)

 

 

Click to play gif animation.

StopMoStyle.prj

[Rodney]

Same premise as demo'd by Eddie:

[pixelplucker]

A render style that would do a hold with no blends between frames would be cool. Take some the tedious out of the animation process. I did something similar doing a hold basically copying all frames and tucking one next to the next.

 

Is it possible to just render at few frames then post scale them to the times making it choppy? Would that give the same effect?

[Rodney]

Would that give the same effect?

 

I think we'd have to know more about the target effect.

 

It'd be pretty straightforward to set up a system where frames are rendered out and then those frames get duplicated so that animation is exposed on 2s, 3s, 4s or whatever to achieve a desired look.

Doing this in other software such as OpenToonz would make quick work of that but A:M also can be set up to achieve something similar with a bit of work.

Once the setup is saved then it's mostly a matter of keeping that project handy so that we don't have to set everything up from scratch again.

 

And there's the thing. Almost any 'look' can be achieved.

It's mostly a matter of research and development and then someone making the determination of when to say 'good enough'..

 

 

Something I like about this particular approach (each frame or series of frames derived from a different instance of the same model) is that once a 'golden' pose is achieved it is pretty well locked in.

Working normally I always have to be careful not to accidentally undo something I did before that I wanted to keep.

[Roger]

Interesting. I've been thinking of exploring something like this for my film. I would probably go with animation on 2s for a smoother effect, though, this looks like you used 3s maybe?

[Rodney]

this looks like you used 3s maybe?

 

I'd say more like 6s.

In the ball bounce there are four poses with one repeated (the stretch) and the animation is 30 seconds long so... 300/5=... yeah, I'd say 6s.

 

I made no attempt to inbetween the poses stretched the keyframes out to 3 seconds.

Each pose is a different instance of the model.

 

In the case of Eddie Jumping (which definitely needs to be inbetweened) I see seven poses. 3 seconds (roughly) @30FPS/7=just shy of 5 so, that'd be equivalent to animating on 5s or 6s.

 

Like I said though, the idea is just to get the main poses into place quickly.

Those could either just be used for reference for 'pure' animation or animated straight ahead (and backward as necessary) from each pose.

 

One area of R&D I need to explore is that of taking two models and finding an optimal (even automated) way to get at an inbetween model.

The inbetweens would ideally be of the 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 and 1/5 order to allow for slow in/slow out accelleration into and out of the key poses**.

While straight inbetweens can certainly be automated the breakdown pose isn't something that generally can (or should) be automated because that route... the decision of where/how to pose the breakdown... is what drives the entire performance. An automated breakdown will often equate to a boring performance with little or no character/personality.

 

 

**The concept of slow in/slow out (ease in/ease out) is something many animation packages have incorporated to automatically give a sense of life/motivation to otherwise uninteresting (unmotivated) action. This is not 'animation' per se but it does add a more realistic sense of movement... of influence... to the effected objects. Adding acceleration /deceleration into and out of a pose almost always improves a shot because it adds change to a otherwise static sequence. Of course it goes much deeper than just getting that sense of change but changing of shapes is what animation is all about. If nothing changes, there is no story being told. What 'animators' do beyond automation and mechanical inbetweening of shapes however is give a sense of life to a per-form-ance. That illusion of life emanating from inanimate objects has much to do with motive/motivation... cause and effect... forces... what is compelling the object or character to move?

[Wildsided]

I love stop motion, loved Morph growing up and anything by Aardman. This might be a good way to block out a sequence, then it could be smoothed out later.

[Rodney]

I'm also planning to test some action baking with this approach because then (at least technically) we could merge the models again and animate in the standard way with the golden pose set in place.

It's mostly theory that likely won't work but finding out will still be quite educational.

[pixelplucker]

What if you just animate normally, make a copy of the project for backup then scale all keys back to 1/4 the total time or 1/3 then rescale the time back up in video post. Should give you the same extended frames right? Maybe less destructive that way too.

[Rodney]

We need to run some test to find out.