Are character stop motion animations possible?
Hi. I don't know if this was brought up before. I couldn't find any similar questions around here.
I've seen MM post a video tutorial on making stop motion animation. The youtube link is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BF_uQuW3nwY
However, their tutorial was about making a clay ball bounce. I really want to know if it's possible to do character stop motion animations like what you see in "Wallace and Gromit" or stop motion films by Laika Studios.
I'm doing a character that uses the "deluxe" puppet. So, I followed MM's stop motion video by using a timeline and not using any keyframe blending. When I did a few keyframe poses of my character and clicked play on the timeline, the "jittery" animation looked pretty much exactly the way I wanted. However, going into play mode made the animation poses "smoothed out" which is not what I want for stop motion. It's almost like the keyframe poses became procedural in play mode.
I figured it's because of the deluxe puppet settings. So, I went into my character's behavior settings and turned off procedural animations, walk. But the animation still played like it's smoothing in play mode.
I don't know if the "basic" puppet would have the same issue. So, I looked up characters on the dreamiverse and found one that seemed completely custom without using the deluxe or basic puppet rig. Unfortunately, the person's puppet's poses still looked smoothed out when I tried to do a stop motion animation with it.
I could upload a screen of my timeline and character. But I don't know if GIF files work here, and that'll help make it easier to show my issue.
The main thing I would like to know is if making character stop motions are even possible in Dreams. Not just in animation but in gameplay as well.
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Yes, it's all possible. Wallace and Gromit use the same methods, actually.
You can use those same techniques to swap out different mouth shapes within the head, for example.
And make sure you don't have any blending between the keyframes. Also, if the keyframes overlap a little, they will average out giving you an extra pose between the two you actually put in there. This can be useful in saving time, but may make the animation less jittery.
If you're animating the whole body and don't need it for gameplay, you could select everything in there and scope it out of the puppet group. Then the puppet behaviours won't mess with it.
You can capture video using the SHARE button. Then upload to youtube from the PS4. Then paste the link here. That's what I tend to do as it's the quickest way.
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