Full 3D animation: Capturing Myriel

@Zaith,

This is a critique from an animator, so understand that I'm trying to help you, not criticize you. My comments are to help you get better and in no way are to hinder your development as an animator.

1. Your hand movements are completely unnatural. Sometimes, you get it right, but the majority of the time you have what we call "lock wrist." Believe it or not, your fingers will move with natural body movements, without even realizing it. As an example, flex your forearm muscles without clenching your fist. Your fingers will naturally attempt to spread out, if you're not making a fist. If you bend your wrist up, the thumb will naturally curl inward. Put some extra effort into your hand animations. It will go a long way to making your animations look superior.

2. All of your characters are flat faced. Your lip syncing is good, but they're all emotionless. If you're animating in Daz (which I applaud you, if you are, 'cos it's animation tools suck donkey balls), use the blend shapes for facial expressions. If you're using Keymate and Graphmate, take the extra effort to blend expressions to make your characters not look so flat.

3. Use dForce Hair or play more with the morphs in the hair. Again, the movements look unnatural. If you're rendering scenes based off storyboards (Which you should be), make sure to scrub the scenes repeatedly using the animation slider. It will go a long way to help you notice wonky animations in hair, body, effects, etc.

4. You really need to work on your lighting. I'm not sure what you're using for a render engine, but the lighting is critical for outstanding animation renders and again, it looks flat and lifeless.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask. I'm out of touch with C4D, though. I haven't touched it since my Amiga days, which ended about 20 years ago. 🙂

Here's an example of one of my "monstrous walk cycles." I did this using a Genesis Character with the Ogre morph for a dungeon crawler I was working on a few years ago. (Disregard the light flicker - A Daz Studio glitch.) This walk cycle was created in Maya, but rendered in Daz Studio.

Notice how I have the hand moving, like it is? That was my watching actual walking videos and altering it to have a heavy stance, since this is supposed to be a large, heavy footed creature.

Not really. Most of my work ends up in video games or indie films, so I don't have a lot of personal stuff, due to NDA.

http://identicalsoftware.com/btbuilder/

Here's a link to the game that this came from, though. There are a few ming animations in it. Mostly attacks and walk cycles. It's based off an old dungeon crawler, called Bard's Tale.