-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
- Thread starter Boss Doggie
- Start date
- Status
Choppasmith
Member
Jintor said:
I don't quite get that last one
@Myke What's that preview for. I mean I can tell it looks like a Karaoke project, but is it for certain software? Just curious.
And yeah that Mad Hatter fanart is awesome. It really looks official too.
Mechanical Snowman
Member
He gets to hang out with ponies all day. He should be the grateful one!G-Fex said:
Mechanical Snowman
Member
you guys are crazy. He lives inside a tree and gets to ride Twilight whenever he feels like. I'd give anything for that life.
Choppasmith
Member
So, has anyone seen this yet? It's a little Pony Desktop app (they wander around the screen). A couple kinks in it, but quite amusing and awesome.
Link https://docs.google.com/document/d/...NINAfgiYEpcJnNVo/edit?hl=en&authkey=CIzrj_gI#
Once again, Pony fanbase is best fanbase.
Link https://docs.google.com/document/d/...NINAfgiYEpcJnNVo/edit?hl=en&authkey=CIzrj_gI#
Once again, Pony fanbase is best fanbase.
Confused101
Member
I haven't found one and it doesn't help that I don't even know who the creator is.Foxix said:
Choppasmith
Member
Confused101 said:I haven't found one and it doesn't help that I don't even know who the creator is.
Here they are
http://drchrissy.deviantart.com/art/Fluttershy-in-Wonderland-204564779
Doesn't look like it comes in Wallpaper size.
ephemeral garbage
Member
Uchip said:
Either Spike ate them, or Rarity made them into a dress and sold it the next day.
Myke Greywolf
Ambassador of Goodwill
It's for Ultrastar, a free Singstar clone for Windows. There is also a multiplatform fork called Ultrastar Deluxe. Great stuff for karaoke fans.Choppasmith said:
I'm making a karaoke file for Winter Wrap Up for this software.
Yeah, it seems like I'm really off the mark. I feel stupid now. :/ZealousD said:
Mechanical Snowman
Member
The running animation is incredibly impressive, isn't it?Ultimoo said:
shaowebb
Member
Dai101 said:
Flash isn't what it used to be when Macromedia owned it Dai101. I'm an animation student using CS5 and since Adobe got ahold of it the program has become incredibly intuitive.
- Boning tools automatically handle squash & stretch alongside springy bouncy physics just like a game engine would. It turns your drawn shapes into the equivalent of RIGS used in 3d animation.
- 3D is possible in flash programmed graphics now and you can import 3d animations into it
- It pipelines directly into imageready and converts all your vector shapes into symbols automatically for tweening
- it now has improved lip synch pipelines so that after you edit your mouth symbol to include shape frames for each sound certain pipelines will time the lip changes to the sounds from your audio file without animators needing to do it by hand.
- It utilizes alpha channels to allow for transparencies, gradients, and now has particle physics for fire to look realistic
- Mirroring, reflection and refraction can be handled using CS5 flash program pipelines
- and best of all it gives the finger to Apple and now can export any action script DIRECTLY into an app store proprietary format. How do you think Angry Birds was made?
I love Flash, and if it wasn't for it most american studios would still be outsourcing everything they wanted to try. It made animation cheap and powerful enough on low budget to bring animation back to American studios who had been outsourcing to Japan and Korea for years to save money. This is why a lot of new series seem tighter in story and writing now...less back and forth misunderstandings overseas.
Thank God for Adobe buying out Flash.
Foxix said:
Koomaster said:
Yeah, my thinking is that they only appear during the hensin transformation, and disappear after. But I kind of like Foxix' theory.
meltingparappa
Member
Up until recently, Flash has usually been equated with "low budget", or at least an aesthetic that isn't associated with a budget. MLP is unique because it has a decent amount of money behind it, and doesn't shy away from the tweening aesthetic.shaowebb said:
Seeing those outline walk cycles make me think it's possible the hair isn't done via boning and IK, which is a massive amount of work that looks fantastic.
Also in fairness, it may be worth noting that half of the episodes ARE outsourced to a giant animation studio in Malaysia, which is presumably why Winter Wrap Up looks better than Over a Barrel.
shaowebb
Member
meltingparappa said:
Hmm...interesting. Most of this could be done using boning if you made the shapes outlined in those images with the exception of the hoof tip...maybe. You may be able to turn that back hoof round and then pointed using the new squash/stretch from boning but it'd take a bit for me to test it out to see if I could get it to work.
I prefer boning for how fluid it makes your movements now that it has squash and stretch. Before things looked like damned IK marrionettes in CS4 and who likes watching that? The whole thing is very doable using shape tweens if you didn't use boning but that would actually make the process way lengthier than is necessary given the amount of shapes to tween on their body from that walk cycle.
Personally if it was my choice of using that many tween layers or just saying to hell with it and using straight ahead animation I'd use straight ahead and onion skin draw in all my frames. It doesn't take long and it's damned sure accurate to do. I'd be surprised if they weren't doing just that for a lot of these scenes, but the hair and tail bounces would be easier handled by boning them and parenting their shapes to the head and hindquarter symbols. This way you only need to tweak and animate the legs, face and maybe the body using tweens or Boning kinematics or inverse kinematics. It just comes out faster and just as good if you let the software handle your secondary actions like hair bouncies after tweaking the physics for it once rather than animating it every time by hand.
Anyway it goes it shows just how far things have come in flash. I named at least 3 different ways you could make this show all using flash and all of those ways are fast, and many can be cut and pasted into other scenes as animation paths that your ponies can have programmed into them so if you programmed an action for them once you wouldn't need to do it again unless it absolutely called for it. Walk cycles would be the first to go into that animation cut/paste folder.
...
God damn I love my field! I can't wait till Oct 12 2012 when I hit the industry!
*and with that he left to go fill out his scholarship renewal*
DrForester
Kills Photobucket
shaowebb said:
Spike sounds just like Disembodio from Rifftrax...
meltingparappa
Member
This is so nerdy and nobody probably cares, but...
I'm only guessing based on those walk cycles, but I imagine the way the episodes are animated roughly breaks down to this:
They probably have you typically have a library of existing symbols that they rarely change, such as heads with its own turnarounds, including individually nested mouth shape and eyes with their own libraries inside of them. Gestures are probably typically redrawn arm or leg shapes, sometimes body shapes or sometimes everything in its entirety, depending on the action.
For typical gestures on the show, you can see that a lot of motion tweens are applied to existing symbols (facial features moving around a fairly static view of a head), but the limbs are typically redrawn in their entirety (characters pointing or clopping or whatever).
Things like Twilight eating the flower pedals is obviously a lot of redraw instead of motion-tweening a library of mouth shapes, and you can tell it's also on a combination of 2's and possibly 3's.
There are some instances where a character will jump and their hair is redrawn and that is partly why it makes me think that maybe they're not going with IK for the hair (which would explain the many layers in the outline view) and just have them nested in some insane way that they are generally good about keeping track of.
Things like full body walk cycles (as opposed to instances where you can fudge it to save time because you don't see their legs) which are frequently reused have significantly greater care thrown into them. This makes perfect sense to do these using an utterly comeelx combination of shape and/or IK tweens, particularly since FIM isn't shying away from the aesthetic you get when keeping motion tweens on ones.
Note that IK/boning is different than motion tweening which is different than shape tweening. Depending on what you're doing, shape tweening is frequently never worth it, and if an effect is gnarly enough than it's probably better being done in AE during post.
Anyway, I'd give an arm and a leg to see an actual production flash file. The implications from those walk cycles is staggering, but I wonder how they handle a typical less-demanding scene.
I'm only guessing based on those walk cycles, but I imagine the way the episodes are animated roughly breaks down to this:
They probably have you typically have a library of existing symbols that they rarely change, such as heads with its own turnarounds, including individually nested mouth shape and eyes with their own libraries inside of them. Gestures are probably typically redrawn arm or leg shapes, sometimes body shapes or sometimes everything in its entirety, depending on the action.
For typical gestures on the show, you can see that a lot of motion tweens are applied to existing symbols (facial features moving around a fairly static view of a head), but the limbs are typically redrawn in their entirety (characters pointing or clopping or whatever).
Things like Twilight eating the flower pedals is obviously a lot of redraw instead of motion-tweening a library of mouth shapes, and you can tell it's also on a combination of 2's and possibly 3's.
There are some instances where a character will jump and their hair is redrawn and that is partly why it makes me think that maybe they're not going with IK for the hair (which would explain the many layers in the outline view) and just have them nested in some insane way that they are generally good about keeping track of.
Things like full body walk cycles (as opposed to instances where you can fudge it to save time because you don't see their legs) which are frequently reused have significantly greater care thrown into them. This makes perfect sense to do these using an utterly comeelx combination of shape and/or IK tweens, particularly since FIM isn't shying away from the aesthetic you get when keeping motion tweens on ones.
Note that IK/boning is different than motion tweening which is different than shape tweening. Depending on what you're doing, shape tweening is frequently never worth it, and if an effect is gnarly enough than it's probably better being done in AE during post.
Anyway, I'd give an arm and a leg to see an actual production flash file. The implications from those walk cycles is staggering, but I wonder how they handle a typical less-demanding scene.
shaowebb
Member
meltingparappa said:
Great observations. And yeah tweening is really not worth all the damned effort a lot of times. Sure it's great for a singular object, but if that object has any extra symbols or moving parts then screw it. Turn it into a damned object, bone it, and either animate it that way or go straight into onion skin and use straight ahead animation to draw in your other frames.
By the way it sounds like you're using flash. What version are you using right now and do you have anything online to view? It's always nice to run into another animator.
Why u gotta bring lupin into this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRJePLa_zT4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRJePLa_zT4
DrForester
Kills Photobucket
Confused101 said:
Think my biggest problem is that they'll get old. By the nature of the character they created to make them they're always going to be doing stupid stuff to get their Cutie Mark. You really can't develop them as characters. Having them get it would remove an element Faust clearly wants in the show. They're the Wesley Crusher's of Ponyville.
DrForester said:
Nah, they can get their cutie marks at some point. I don't think those characters are eternally stuck to be the CMC. Apple Bloom played a pretty big role in Bridle Gossip and there was no mention of cutie marks there.
Mechanical Snowman
Member
It's certainly one way to put it. It's a nice thing to be able to sit down for 22 minutes and watch something so innocent and fun. I've seen two people now say that the show's helped them, at least a bit, deal with depression.wsippel said:
Though some people are just furries, or whatever the pony equivalent of that is.
DrForester
Kills Photobucket
ChuckNoLuck said:
If you like rivalry, Fall Weather Friends (episode 13) has a competition as the story.
Boss Doggie
all my loli wolf companions are so moe
Has anyone posted this up yet? There's a preview for the Super Ponybeat You Gotta Share.
Captain Fish
Member
Hoofies?Mechanical Snowman said:
On the CMC front, I think how they deal with them in the last CMC episode of the season will be telling. Narratively, the audience already knows the ending of their story arc: they'll receive singing/crafting/scooting cutie marks. The question is how long can they dance around that ending and still have it be entertaining (unless it's all a massive bait and switch). I already thought The Show Stoppers episode got a little farfetched, but it had a fun payoff.
All in all I think I would be pleased if they ended the arc sooner rather than later. Perhaps after one or two (or maybe all three) of the CMC get their marks and cause a falling out. Marks are covered up, discovered, friendships are broken and patched and they just decide to carry on regardless of it. Maybe do an episode about them overdoing their mark thing, and then just keep them around as younger members of the cast.
DrForester
Kills Photobucket
Foxix said:
Whole things been out a while now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FGmgVu9Nz0&feature=related
- Status