"transformers" animation morphing

[XCNuse]

hey, i dont know if any of you guys have seen the new 9-7x commercial, but its really inspired me to do something similar.. dunno what lol but once i figure that part out i guess i will get to work (commercial is here: http://www.saabusa.com/ go to bottom right where it says saab was born from jets, and then after intro and stuff on bottom right area it says watch tv spots, and its the dark one on the far right)

so .. are there any tutorials on transformers type animation, i've never really tried animation but twice, both with reactor animations.. just to fool around and try to get into it, but i can never find any good tutorials, anyone know if they even exist?

[loocas]

I seriously doubt there will be any...

This is something way too specific and quite simple at the same time Simple animation-wise, ofcourse the preparation, production, rendering atd... is a different story.

But if you have a very nicely prepared model for the transition, the animation part is a breeze!

So, first off, try to come up with a motion or transformation of whatever to whatever and then try to think how you'd prepare the meshes so that they fit one to another and you'll be able to easily morph from one to another

Sounds easier than it actually is, but really, there are more challenging jobs out there....

[anthonymcgrath]

hi guys
okay so its ooooh... 4 years late hhehehe but not been on this site in so long. Just wanted to share out my own transformer animation I put together last year or something.

This is the original animation... I modelled a 33gtr Nissan Skyline and decided to turn it into a robot after transformer2 hit the big screen heh..

You need to upgrade your Flash Player

This is the making of video. Its kind of generic but the general methodology and approach of tackling such an animation is in there. Everyone might do it differently but the way I tackled it allowed me to animate it in different ways. For example I was able to animate it transforming as it came out of a drift into a run sequence.

You need to upgrade your Flash Player

hope it helps!
ant

[TwoOneOne]

wow that´s a nice animation there!
and i really liked the making of video.
thanks for sharing your process.

Cheers

[digitaleyes]

wow that´s a nice animation there!
and i really liked the making of video.
thanks for sharing your process.

Cheers

+1 ... great stuff!

[anthonymcgrath]

cheers chaps - glad it helps. As I said it wasn't so much a direct how to as a series of concepts gathered from the way they tackled them on the transformers movies and some other techniques I'd seen people tackle.

There were a couple of tricks I did though... in maya you can create a second time node and plug your animated objects into that. Then you can drive that time node with a slider (or any attribute really... translation, rotation, scale, shader value you name it). That way you can animate complicated animation around a particular bodypart (lower arm for example) and you only have to key it all once, sliding and shifting around each part. Then all that stuff is being driven by one slider. Simply dragging the slider the other way reverses the animation.

Another thing I did was script some nodes to 'jiggle' when its parent node was animated and stopped suddenly. This gave the wobble on the tyres, collarbones and the bumper.

It took some serious fettling to get the joints to fold away how I need them to but I'm quite happy with it overall - the youtube movie always looks dark & crushed though - looks alot better as a high res quicktime movie on my site.

[Distorted_Imagery]

cheers chaps - glad it helps. As I said it wasn't so much a direct how to as a series of concepts gathered from the way they tackled them on the transformers movies and some other techniques I'd seen people tackle.

There were a couple of tricks I did though... in maya you can create a second time node and plug your animated objects into that. Then you can drive that time node with a slider (or any attribute really... translation, rotation, scale, shader value you name it). That way you can animate complicated animation around a particular bodypart (lower arm for example) and you only have to key it all once, sliding and shifting around each part. Then all that stuff is being driven by one slider. Simply dragging the slider the other way reverses the animation.

Another thing I did was script some nodes to 'jiggle' when its parent node was animated and stopped suddenly. This gave the wobble on the tyres, collarbones and the bumper.

It took some serious fettling to get the joints to fold away how I need them to but I'm quite happy with it overall - the youtube movie always looks dark & crushed though - looks alot better as a high res quicktime movie on my site.

Damn dude, reet blast from the past here,
Hows it going, hope you are all well and good.
Excellent animation, saw this a while back on your webby, must of took some time like!
btw its Ste from a few years back old nic was (diablo_angelus)
Drop me a message man, would be good to catch up and know what you been up to.

Cheers

Ste

[anthonymcgrath]

hi Ste good to hear from you mate - hope your still pottering on with the ol' 3d stuffs! I'll pm you my email address now! glad you like the anim too :D

[DaveCox]

So great to see this! Thanks for sharing!

[element]

great animation...congratulate for frontpage!

[anthonymcgrath]

wow frontpage - thankyou!