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All the constructive criticism in my post with the 'hooker' firing a gun was very inspiring, so I started working on an animation of the main character, Jac, unholstering his gun. First I tried ad libbing it, as with the 'hooker', but the result was horrible, so I gave up after two hours.

Then I realised I could do some old fashioned motion-capture using my webcam, and since I just bought a nice USB 2.0 one that can handle 30 fps, I decided to have a go using this technique.

So after recording the short clip of me unholstering a Glock 17, I saved it as JPEGs. I got 57 frames, so I decided to cut down on that to make creating the sprites more manageable, and ended up with a nice 12 frames.

So after roughly 10 minutes I had made 4 rough frames (as many as I had made by hand before), and realised this is definitely the way to go when animating quasi-human motion.

Here's the result I've got so far (now presented without watermark):



The problems I have so far, that I know of, are as follows.

• Shape of the bottom of the jacket changes too much on frame 2.
• He pulls his weapon through the jacket. Supposed to move the jacket aside first to clear it. I didn't motion capture it as this, but I will record myself doing this, and fix it.
• The last frame has a bit too much of a skipping feel to it, it needs to be more fluid.
• I should probably add a little motion to the lower legs, even though there was none in my motion capture.
• Again.. I just realised that the animation really ends too abruptly.

First of all, nevermind the hooker, it's not supposed to be a hooker firing the gun, but I started out just playing around with her (maybe that sounds a bit wrong) and soon I had her firing a gun..

Second, the speed of the animation was a lot better in Adobe ImageReady. In Firefox/IE it slowed down quite a bit, so just.. imagine that it's faster

Anyways, I'll get to the point. I look at the animation, and I think something is missing, but I can't exactly put my finger on what it is. Could it be that she's firing a gun, but the recoil is hardly noticable? Maybe I should make her flinch a bit, closing her eyes as the gun goes off..

I've been staring myself blind at this thing the past hour while working on it, so I could really use some input..



(Oh, and sorry about the big © - we live in dangerous times and I'm paranoid )