Dancer Archive
Thread: To the People Complaining About the New Flourishes...
Anyway. I'm getting VERY upset with people who say the new flourishes are bad because they are hand animated (instead of mocap).
YES the new flourishes look bad but it is NOT because they are hand animated, people! It is because they were BADLY hand animated!
I am a professional animator and each time someone here says these flourishes look like crap due to being 'hand animated' you are seriously upsetting me. If I'd done these flourishes, I guarantee that they would have looked great.
Once again: HAND ANIMATION IS NOT BAD! They just had a BAD ANIMATOR!
Please stop blaming it on being hand animation and blame the art director who hired this untrained and/or untalented person to hack out those flourishes for us. Please. Stop bashing those of us who know our craft well and place the blame where it belongs.
Actually, now that they've been slowed down a bit, they don't look as bad.
The main problem with them initially is they were about twice as fast as the old ones.
Now they just look slightly stilted. And they outright defy the laws of physics in some cases. Not as good as the old flourishes, but not outright horrible like they were at first.
YES the new flourishes look bad but it is NOT because they are hand animated, people! It is because they were BADLY hand animated!
Well ... we'd be dickering over terms, but really the reason the new animations look so crappy is because we're comparing them to the motion-captured animations that came with the box. You can't possibly expect any hand animation to compare to motion capture.
Moot point because they're going to redo the crappy flourishes so they look a little more fluid. It's good to know that SOE has some pride in the product they produce.
I was a dancer for many, many years... performed on stage and so on... my specialty was animating dance sequences.
A good, experienced animator can do stuff that looks as good as mocap. In some cases, even better.
You are insulting me quite a bit by telling me that hand animation 'cannot compare' to mocap. That is making me pretty unhappy, regardless of how it is a moot point now.
Actually I think they look bad because they don't appear to be recognizable dance moves which many of the original flourishes were... I think the developers just made them up, or pulled some obscure dance move from a video they have sitting around. Also, it's hard to hand animate somethinglike dancing if you don't know it inside and out - you wouldn't know what the correct hand/arm/leg alignments were supposed to be, and would probably overlook them while watching a video.