So, my experience with the 11 second club was not a pleasant one. Oddly enough, everyone who gave me feedback were the act-it-out-yourself-no-reference type of people, which was entirely unhelpful because at the time I couldn’t physically do that (I was hoping people would actually give feedback on the movements I already had, how they were wrong, and where to go to find usable reference material that’d apply). I really had no idea what to do, so the whole thing just degraded into an utter horror for animation everywhere.
But the biggest thing were people’s reaction to the model my rig uses. It’s just a somewhat old makehuman model, chosen because I figured it wouldnt be too hard to write some scripts to easily move my rig onto any makehuman-generated character (which didn’t pan out, since they’ve changed their model several times since then).
It really frustrated me, because I didn’t think people would care so much. The truth is, I find almost every publicly available (almost always cartoony) rigged character as visually horrendous as people reacted to my model. I don’t know why, I just can’t stand any of them, and the ones I can stand just don’t have good enough rigging to be usable. But I can still watch other people’s animation on those models and appreciate it just fine. I expected other people to do the same for me.
Anyway, I now need to model a new character. I’m thinking some sort of cartoony cat. Something that’s exaggerated and comic-ish, and very different from all the many cartoony models already out there. It’ll probably take me a while to do this, since I don’t really have time and it takes quite a while to model+rig a character.
January 20, 2009 at 11:09 am
What was your entry ? I think the problem is that this kind of competitions are strongly oriented to the industry standard toon style.
If you go out of that style, people’s brain just blow up. Keep it up !
PS: If you’re still interested, if I were you I’d just rig one of those standard clones everybody is happy with…
January 20, 2009 at 11:26 am
Heh it really is extremely horrible, I completely misexecuted it. http://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/october08/entry/EOxh9n/ . My attempts to plan the action out sortof died when I had a total mind block on what the characters should be doing. I essentially did it entirely blind to any vision of how it should look, which was a really really bad idea
January 20, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Oh well, I’ve read the comments and it wasn’t so bad
maybe you’re just feeling sensitive about it.
There are just a couple of them “suggesting” there might be a rig problem, but other than that, they gave you positive and well mean comments if you read them unpassionately
Check the arcs and poses, you’re doing fine, next will be better !
January 20, 2009 at 11:59 pm
Ah, actually the comments on the submission itself are much more constructive then the ones I got before on cgtalk and the contest forums. I wonder if using a realistic rig like mine is appropriate for a contest like this.
Of course, I didn’t spend an especially large amount of effort perfecting the deformations (and I probably shouldn’t have reacted to people’s “eww their nude” comments by adding crappy modeled clothes that just made things worse).
January 21, 2009 at 11:33 am
ah I haven’t read the other comments. Well, it is true that people EXPECT to see some toony character, and the whole thing of this contest is pointing to that IMHO.
In the other hand, now you know the kind of comments you can expect in the forums hehehehe
When evaluating animation usually bad deformations are’t too relevant, that can be fixed in the final stage. More important are poses and arcs, so I’d focus on that. Also you used a lot of cameras and that’s distracting, if you are showing off your animation skills (as in the case of the contest), it might be better to stick to one camera and let the actors play for that camera.
Keep it up !