Mr. Alien - animation - a WIP, not sure I'll finish it.

My goal is to know something more about the process of character animation. One step bit further then the basics.

It’s all about this dude.
It’s medium Poly, 3 fingers, 2 toes. I added some sort of facial expressions (shape keys). Have some problems on bone bending (vertices weighting). But it’s good enough to do some animations.

I use Eevee, because of the fast frame animations. But have some difficulties on shadows and glass. But I try not lean on those aspects that much.

So Mr. Alien has some transportation

And a robot

The first baby steps, several actions in the NLA editor. This is where my knowledge stops.

https://vimeo.com/362383609

Facial test run …

https://vimeo.com/361985281

And robo run.

https://vimeo.com/manage/359253023/general

Have fun, go render something

Pete this is awesome! Love this little guy and the animations you have done with him :slight_smile: Apparently your post here didn’t work at first because your images were Base64 so we had to convert them to PNG and works fine. Anyways, can’t wait to see what you do with this guy if you decide to do more!

I’m digging the vibe of the UFO very retro '60’s. I’m imagining it with a paint job sorta like Janice Joplin’s car.

I like the red veins in the alien’s eyeballs.

Animation is a royal pain. I wish it was more like stop motion rather than keyframe because I just can’t understand how to space the keyframes and how to tell speed and timing and all that. My animations always run faster than expected though they look fine in the program itself when scrubbing through the timeline.

Yes, animation is difficult and gaining knowledge about it is difficult. Currently I have a lot of troubles with the NLA editor. Tutorials are difficult to find.

Blender is capable of managing the key frames based on time. Difficult to explain and not only by dragging keys to a different time.

Say you have an animation of 10 seconds. But this need to be 9 seconds. There is a feature, to recalculate the timeline (not the keys) by Blender. I forgot how. I has something to do with FPS.
With that knowledge, you can easily change the speed of a walk cycle. Or do things in slow motion.

The problem is, the internet is full of howto’s. They all explain the same things over and over again. But a next level is difficult to find.

Do you have some animation projects I can see?