In the world of traditional animation, these are called "smears". One of the many ways traditional animators learned to mimic motion blur, and in this case, improve upon it.(To be more precise, a true "smear" does look like a drawing stretched like a comic on Silly Putty --- you've done that, right? But I put these multiple images into the same category.)
It got me to thinking, is there anyone who is doing anything like this in CG? Would it look good? Or just freaky? Since CG is more akin to puppet animation, I kind of doubt there has been too much experimentation of this sort, especially since motion blur is so easy to render.
I bet there are plenty of Flash animators who are trying this. Anybody want to point me in the direction of some Flash that's stylized like this? The "smear" technique goes beyond squash & stretch, it's adding something beyond reality rather than imitating or caricaturing it.
Beautiful, beautiful.
6 comments:
Chicken Little definitly had some real smears. Though it wouldn't surprise me if multiples is something that's never been done in CG. Perhaps in the Eric Goldberg directed 3D Genie film for Disneyland Tokyo?
Doesn't surprise me about Chicken Little. Mark Dindal is an old school affectionado.
I'll have to frame through that movie, now.
There goes my weekend.
Actually we did do some experimenting with multiples when i was back at ReelFX. It was actually Ken Duncan out in LA doing most of the experimenting (I was stuck directing the boring- but profitable- work). It didn't look bad at all. It was a rather simplistic approach using trailing versions of the arms and legs at increasing levels of transparency. It was applied to anything sticking off the main core of the body- limbs mostly. It was a bit of a pain to get working though because it required that you pose 3 or 4 different arms for each inbetween frame. But that rig was a right pain to use for everything. If the rig was friendlier I don't think it would have been half bad. I have an example but NDA's prohibit sharing it. We ended up taking a lot of the mutliples out because when you render multiples with motion blur- well.. they didn't play nice together. We had to do one or the other and the creative director felt motion blur was a better choice. Oh well.
Anyhoo- I've tinkered with this here at the homestead and got OK results- again just on limbs. As for doing multiples of a face or the body trunk in general I haven't seen anything short of a stupid compositing trick. Certainly nothing you can see interactively in the actual scene. Sounds like an interesting challenge. Hmmmmm.
yeah, ive dabbled with it, with my cows, but i doubt it looks anything that resembles "good." i'm almost tempted to see if i can pull it off with blendshapes, but then again i might be crazy for thinking that. oh well, we'll see.
When we worked on the Roger Rabbit sequel test at the Disney Orlando studio (directed by Eric Goldberg, animated by Tom Bancroft and Barry Temple, cleaned-up by yours truly, James Harris and Sherrie Sinclair) Eric had Rob Bekurs duplicate one of Tom's hand-drawn scenes of Roger in CG, complete with smears. It looked pretty good, so I think it can be done. Chicken Little looked like it did have smears/multiples. I think the difference is that the rendering on CG maybe makes it "too real" , so it doesn't have the same powerful graphic quality of the types of smears that the Warner Bros. cartoons were famous for. It's an easy technique to misuse. Eric's a master of using smears.
The best Flash character animation I've seen is by a brilliant young Canadian designer/animator named Jessica Borutski. Her film "I Like Pandas" has won a slew of awards and she's currently working on a new film "The Good Little Bunny with Big , Ugly Teeth" . Take a look at her work on here blog --
http://jessicaborutski.blogspot.com/
"I Like Pandas" is on YouTube.
Hey, just a lurker here (and not an animator) but I was listening to Brad Birds interview with Spline Doctors the other day. He mentioned wanting "arcs in the blurs". It seemed in some way related to the topic at hand. Thanks.
..d
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