Animation

New Character Sindy Spheres I'm working on

Sindy's Spheres from below

Keyframe Based Animation

In this post I'm going to briefly describe the animation technique I use when creating animations, and give a bit of history on how my technique evolved over time.  I'm not going to dive into an incredible level of detail (this isn't an in depth tutorial of how to do animation) but rather just give an overview.  If people are more interested in having an actual tutorial on how to create animations using Daz Studio, I can definitely do a more detailed post in the future.

When I started out with my deviant art page, I asked myself: how can I set my page a bit apart from the pages of other BE or FMG art creators so that people will want to come visit my page.  I knew that there were far superior artists out there, both ones who draw and those who render.  And even then - back in 2007 or so - there were already a huge number of artists on DA doing FMG, BE, and Giantess stuff.  But what I noticed there wasn't a lot of were arists who were posting animations.

So I figured, ok, why don't I post animations to my newly created DA page?  Maybe that would be a differentiator that would get people to visit it.  And I figured, hey, how hard could it be?  Well as with many things, it turned out to be harder than I'd thought.  But not impossible.  And as with many things I've tried, if you just stick to it you can reach at least a certain level of ability with it that allows you to create things.

When I first started animating, I used what could be called keyframe based animation.  And I did it manually.  The results were ok, but ended up looking kind of mechanical and non fluid in the types of motions I created it.  For keyframe animation, the process works as follows:

First you take your figure, say the Victoria 4 model from daz3d, and put her in an initial pose.  Say she's standing there, hands on hips, with normal sized boobs.

Next you do the following step over and over and over: Skip about 10 frames ahead (at 30 frames per second, that means about 0.3 seconds of time). Then *slightly* alter her pose.  So move her arms a little, her legs a little, her head a little, etc.

What animation software will do for you in the process is automatically fill in the in between frames using interpolation.  So in my example above, you do have to manually pose your model once every 10 frames.  So you have posed on frames 1, 11, 21, 31, 41, 51, etc etc etc.  But the software does the work of filling in frames 2-9, 12-20, 22-30, 32-40, 42-50 etc etc etc.  The software knows how to fill in those frames so that it looks like motion.

This whole process is a bit like stop motion photography.  And you can definitely use it to do BE or FMG.  For BE what I would normally do is first is go to some frame - like frame 90 (3 seconds into the animation) and lock the boob size to be something small. Then I'd zoom ahead maybe 4 seconds to frame 210 (remember, 30 seconds per frame) and make the boob size huge.  The magic of interpolation in the animation software would then just fill in frames 91 through 209 by making the boobs smoothly get bigger and bigger and bigger in a continuous way from the small size on frame 90 to the big size on frame 209.  Voila, simple BE.

Interpolated Frames Make Keyframed Tits Grow Smoothly

Aniblocks with mocapped motions

Mocap Aniblock Makes Sindy Move

I'd do a similar thing for FMG.  Start with a girl who has regular sized muscles on frame 90.  Crank her muscles up huge on frame 210.  Let the computer fill in the growing muscles from frames 91 to 209.  That wasn't too hard to do and worked pretty well.  But coupling the BE or FMG with a woman moving in some interesting way did take time.  That involved the laborious process of tweaking the model's pose once every 10 frames or so.  But that's how I did it early on.  The result would be animations that had motions that looked a bit robotic and non natural.  Akin to what you'd get if you took an action figure and did a stop motion film with her.

I did get feedback as time went on and suggestions from people on how to improve animations.  Some people mentioned doing pulsing growth, where a woman's tits first balloon outward to a big size, then retract a bit, then balloon to a bigger size.  Similar thing for female muscle growth.  And I was able to play with that using the keyframing technique described above.

I asked Leviathan once about how he did animation.  If you haven't seen his work, he makes animations of incredible explosive growth, both BE and FMG and sometimes giantess and even transformations into beast like creatures.  He told me that he uses keyframing but he updates poses every 5 frames or so.  And he does it at a very granular level, individually manipulating single body parts, and taking care to make the breasts look like they are bouncing and so on.  That is incredibly painstaking work.  If you look at some of the amazing animations he's done, I think you'll agree that the work pays off.  But for me there are a couple reasons that his approach would be tough for me to do.

First off, there's the time commitment per animation.  Huge.  Secondly, he really is a master at manipulating individual body parts through keyframing to achieve a look that is dynamic, not so robotic, and even explosive when he does growth sequences.  It takes a certain artistic eye to do that and I just don't really have it.  I could try to get better at keyframing, but as time went on I realized that I was going to need to do something different to make my animations improve.

That's when I discovered mocap.  Now motion capture  is used quite extensively in movies these days. Gollum from lord of the rings is animated using motion capture.  If you're not familiar with the technique, what is done is that a live human actor moves around while a computer captures and records the actual motions of that actor's various body parts.  That recorded motion information is then applied to a computer figure (like Gollum, or for me a model like Victoria 4 from Daz Studio).  The resulting motions look very lifelike and realistic because they are actual human motions.

Setting up a motion capture studio like Peter Jackson used is obviously prohibitively expensive for a small time creator like me.  But some technologies, such as the motion sensing controller used by the Wii, or even better, the Kinect for the Xbox 360, have been making it possible to do some motion capture at home on a much smaller budget.

The type of mocap I started using was in the form of some recorded motion capture sequences that were put on sale at daz3d.com in the form of "aniblocks".  An aniblock is a snippet of motion that you can use to move your character.  And you can combine aniblocks.  So for example, one of the sets of aniblocks I bought were for motion captured belly dancer movements.  So I could grab one of those aniblocks, which would make a woman start waving her arms side to side while moving her belly, and apply it to Victoria 4.  Then I could put a second aniblock in for making her smile and blink.  Those two aniblocks will work together to make her start belly dancing *and* at the same time smile and blink.  You can continue to layer on some more aniblocks that also have their motions superimposed.

There weren't any "make the girl have big boobies" aniblocks in the store, so I created a few of those on my own.  Same for muscle growth.

So I started making animations using motion capture aniblocks I had bought from daz3d.com combined with keyframe aniblocks for making boobs and muscles bigger that I created.  Put them together and you get a woman who at least is moving a lot more realistically (motion capture).  The boob growth / muscle growth are still essentially keyframed, but at least they are combined with realistic human motion.

That's essentially the technique I'm still using today.  Mocap aniblocks coupled with keyframed boob/muscle or giantess growth.  There are so many ways in which I still have a long way to go as far as making great animations goes.  In many of my animations, the boobs don't bounce.  So I'd like to get a lot better at that.  I struggle with making a woman's arms not collide with her humungous tits in animations.  Because if they do, the simple software I use - Daz Studio - doesn't really have collision detection built in for animations.  So the arm will go right on through a huge boob if I am not careful.

I want to create animations that are richer in detail, have much more realistic motion and so on.  And I will try to continue getting better.

That's enough for this post.  If people are more interested in specifics or tutorials on animation, I could do a post like that in the future.