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DoodleBuggy — Swim Test 1: Manta Ray Mermaid
Published: 2012-04-02 21:00:50 +0000 UTC; Views: 6902; Favourites: 163; Downloads: 65
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Description
Well I tallied the votes for the most popular mermaid designs and now I'm going to take the top 8 and do animation tests of them swimming.How a character moves in animation is just as important as how they look. I want to make sure I am able to make an informed decision on which character to use in my Animated Short.
So here is the first one. The Manta Ray Mermaid. Its not perfect but I think I got the over all flow of the wings. I had to remove the hands because I had trouble making them look attached to her. If I figure out how to add hands, i'll upload another.
See the original design here: [link]
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Comments: 35
Took me a while, but I finally got to this.
It's a very nice animation!
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I shall! Once i figure out how to animate hair underwater better! I'm going to be doing some hair movement studies.
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Coolness! P.S., your mermaid concepts are so cool and original
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That's cute~
For the hands...would some fingers, in the style of a sort of fringe at wing's edge,, work ? The only other thing I can think if is if you added the hands as some form of talon. [link] [link] [link] I included the links to some images I Googled quickly, to let you know what I ended up thinking about, in style of the image. It works well the way it is, though, and it flows well.
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interesting idea! I shall try that!
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It looks like a cross between a manta ray and a penguin. I find that exceedingly adorable.
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frame by frame. I don't dare do shape tween cause it corrupts all my animation files that use it. Plus its can easily be misused and make very lazy looking animation.
But the point of the animation is that it helps me to fully understand how the things move. I plan on making a CGI animation and for it to work, I'm going to need to truly understand the movements. If I used shape tween, it might look right but I wouldn't really understand the movements by heart.
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Oh! It's quite beautiful and smooth. There's a bit of a skip when her wing goes back down, you can see the background through her body, but it's still very nice.
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ok according to my friend, there is indeed a skip that I might not being seeing on my computer. He thinks it might be a glitch only seen on other computers or different flash players. May I ask what version of flash player you have? If an entire group of people are going to be seeing an error I need to fix it.
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Yah sure! It's 11.2.202.228. I'm also on a Mac, currently updated, if that helps.
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What what? a skip? I don't see it..have I just stared at it so long that I ignore it? Maybe I should get ride of the part where her hair gets bumped up cause I think people are thinking its an error or something... Oh I see a tip of the wing that hasn't been colored, is that it?
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Ah...I looked at it again, and I can see how it's her hair just moving up, sorry about that. I just wanted to point it out in case it WAS an error.
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yeah, I'm worried. If its not obvious at first, maybe I should go back and make it more obvious or get ride of it. See this is why its important to have peer reviews. Helps get an outside look. Since my finial animation is going to be viewed by the public, it is important to know what the public is going to think.
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Righto then; I'm glad I helped, I think!
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Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming. What do we do? We swim, swim swim,
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yes, thats her hair flying up ward when her "shoulders" bump them.
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Mmhmm, I like the effect 
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well you can see through it because thats the shape of her back. But if it seems to sharp, I'm going to have to try and fix it. For me it made sence because I know what the shape of her torso looks like with out the hair and the wings so its obvious to me, but its not obvious to the viewers and its the viewers who decide if something is a success or not. I'll tweak it some more.
Do you think I should have the hair buckle at all? I was wondering if I should have some of the hair fall over her 'shoulders' or not. It was like that in the original design and I thought it was cute but it might not follow the logical stream of the hair. What do you think?
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I hadn't noticed it until it was mentioned, but once I looked I actually really liked the way the hair slides and falls, I think it works really well, it added that extra touch that for me said 'Buggy really knows how hair moves'.
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The shape doesn't seem very streamlined to me and that's important underwater, haha...
I think the hair looks fine. In my experience--I'm not exactly a mermaid, but I do study the motion of hair for my own animations whenever I can--it's a realistic movement. It wouldn't apply if she was moving at a very fast pace, but she seems leisurely enough to get that effect.
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Hmm..you have a point! I need to look up how fast manta-rays swim. Animating hair under water is very hard, in fact, for the Little Mermaid, animators got so frustrated that they instead based the hair movement on women in space.
I looked up videos online and when women were moving at a consistence speed, their hair didn't really move much as hair does in wind for example. But humans can only swim quickly for short distances (at least with the breast stroke) so it was a bit hard. I need to get my sister to swim for me. She has long hair.
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Yeah, it's a very delicate balance between gravity and buoyancy. I haven't attempted it, myself, yet.
That's a good idea.
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