The Animation
General
There are many techniques to animate. Generally you draw a storyboard, create some animatics, make a pose to pose rough animation, and then rework the thing adding the proper inbetweening.
Well, I didn't do any of them. I bought some animation books only a couple of weeks ago and I'm now in the process of studying seriously. Before that, I trusted only my instinct.
The storyboard was only in my head. The look, timing and the music of the final piece were there as well. After all, it was a solo project and I tried to keep it secret as long as possible. Even my closest friends had to beg me to tell them what the ending was...:-))
I learned recently that my approach to the animation is called "straight ahead", meaning that I usually start from the still model and move it a bit, then go back and play it over and over again until my head can figure out what the next movement will be.
Repeat it until a first rough animation is done and then go back and add the secondary movements and tweak the timing a bit. I think it worked well for the realistic kind of animation I was doing. On a cartoony, snappy, fast animation, it might not be the best method.
The Horse
This one was the tough guy. The model had less animatable controls than the knight, but a four legged creature with such a variety of walk/run cycles was pretty difficult to make it look right.
The best approach, was to work like in slow motion and then speed thing up for the final rendering. This way, you can see all the little movements that happens and you can follow them with your eyes and mind while playing the tests.
The gallop, at normal speed, needs quite a lot of keys at subframe level since it's an extremely fast movement. Even faster than what I used in "Eroica", where I slowed things down a bit to simulate the heavyness of the armour and the knight who is supposed to weight quite a lot by himself.
Most of the animation is Forward Kinematix, except for the scene where the horse rise on his rear legs, where I used IK for the rear legs matching a FK version of them.
Even the close-up scene where the horse starts walking over the bridge was not IK. I used a little trick to keep the feet from sliding. MAX 1.2 Inverse Kinematics didn't allow me to get the right movements.
You can find some sample cycles in the animations page.
The Knight
Our hero was not really hard to animate. The model allowed quite a lot of freedom and only in a very few scenes I had to change things slightly to correct some geometry intersections. The only thing I couldn'd do as good as I wanted was the walk cycle.
Since I forced myself to use only MAX 1.2, even when 2.0 became available, I run into a few problems when using IK on the legs. I thought about different solutions, even a trick like I used for the horse on the bridge, but for the knight it was a bit harder and time was tight.
One interesting thing was the knight riding the horse. The two things together had a number of controls very hard to handle. First you try to get the horse right, then you start moving the knight body and simulating some inertia from the moving platform, then you start with arms, fingers and head.
When you get that stage right, you need to correct the legs and the intersections with the horse, and finally move the 5 dummy objects controlling the reins, avoiding intersections and simulating weight and inertia.
Check out the early knight tests in the animations page.
Atmospheric Effects
There are no scenes that do not have atmospheric effects. Some of them have 20, some other a bit less, but except for a few very simple ones where I use just one, there are usually three different effects: Fog, volumetric lights and combustions (for fires and ground fog).
I wanted them everywhere even if they usually add an awful lot to the rendering time. But each image has a different personality with them. You can see the depth, the light is more smooth and the fog wrapping the objects makes an even darker and colder look.
Am I saying something stupid? I hope not. I really believe the hours spent testing fog density, noise, phase speed and creating projection maps made a huge difference.
Using the camera
How many good animations are wasted every day because of poor use of the camera? A common mistake is to overuse the virtual camera ability to move effortless in the computer generated world.
This effect is very dangerous. I'm not saying it's always wrong, but it has to be used very carefully. I tried to simulate a real camera and get nice points of view in each of the 56 shots in Eroica. I went to the movies a few times paying attention to some professional camera work, and then I just tried to do the same.
An important target was to show everything. All the details of each model, all the movements of the animated objects. The reason is simple: if I didn't show everything, I would have just wasted my time in modeling/animating that detail. :-))