EDIT: Yes, I know the arm and fingers are totally fucked up. I’ve commented in reply to some who have mentioned this explaining why and the limitations of the program. If you really don’t like it, there is a down vote button and as of right now a score of ~90 isn’t bad.
Loading...
Loading...
6 months late … goodbye
A little bit of both I suppose. A link to both the program download and a video showing how it works is in the description. It’s a bit hard to use considering that it’s in Japanese (and you night need to run applocale with it, it seems to work fine in windows 8 without though, the menu bar is just filled with equally unidentifiable characters) but once you learn what button and slider does what, you get a better feel for how to use it. (I still honestly don’t know exactly how the 3 sliders affect the physics. I think it has to do with elasticity, weight, and frequency, but in still pretty much sliding them around blindly until I see something I like.)
Anyways, if you’d like, I can try to explain how it works here, given that the tutorial provided is clear as mud.
Perhaps read the rest of the comments to see why, and the fact that everyone has already mentioned this. Any NEW input is appreciated, but people are starting to sound like a broken record…
Actually, I’m not the same person who created the animations with Babs, Octavia, etc.
He uses programs like Photoshop and After Effects and spends 2-3 hours on them. This took me a half hour give or take and the software was free :P
Oh! As for the animation quality itself, XX-Cake can only handle so much, there are upper limits to image size and GIFs saved out of the program are limited to a maximum of 15 frames; I had to save it as an AVI and convert it to a GIF with another program.
That’s the spirit.
Yeah, looking at it now, the forearm and the fingers are definitely an issue. The fingers are an easy fix, but the forearm less so. The program essentially allows you to define certain areas of a mesh over the image to deform in a certain way when moved and create other areas that follow a certain path, but are completely fixed in movement. By extending the range of the rigid movement around the hand to the fingers, that should solve that issue. The arm though, there is no real way in the program to create a “joint” like an elbow or wrist. I tried making the rest of the forearm more sensitive to movement and rigid in hopes that it would follow the hand better, but it was a futile attempt and only looked worse.
Alas, this is but a mere first attempt, perhaps I can produce something better next time! ;D
I can’t say for certain how to fix these issues, but for example, the way Celestia’s fingers growing longer and shorter in the cycle motion does not look natural. The way the rest of the hand is stationary while only half of it moves isn’t how that sort of muscle movement would look like. Twilight’s breathing is too fast and wobbly, I mean, she looks like she is hyperventilating. The animation loop isn’t as smooth as it should be and you can see exactly when the image loops.
It is an excellent effort and I could not do it better it myself, but those are some of the stuff I see right away.
By not using image manipulation.
Sorry, but this just looks like pants and using the method you used it will keep looking like pants.