Blog #2: Cycles
Hello again! This week, we worked on a cycle, well, many cycles. But the idea is to create something that goes around and around and doesn’t stop until you want it to. Like a cat’s tail, in my instance. This exercise was somewhat difficult due to my lack of knowledge with Adobe Animate. I am also practiced with using a cintiq so most of the items were mouse-drawn which, unless you’re a Disney princess, is a lot harder to get a mouse to do what you want, and singing wasn’t working. Anyway, the main idea for this Room of Cycles was to create a similar feeling to those lofi music videos on YouTube. A cat in the window, swishing its tail. A fireplace roaring, a book floating around. But working in 24fps drawing fire is harder than I thought. It kind of bubbles and jerks unnaturally, but I guess that’s what I get for trying to draw frame-by-frame. I was having issues with the shape motion feature and it would just flip and flop like a pancake fish out of water. Same with the magic that holds up the book as it flies across the room. It looks jerky and looks like an old animation amongst the smoother ones that were made with Classic tweens. But no one is a master overnight, so i have my work cut out for me.
For the cycles themselves, I first thought of the cat’s tail, being the simplest to produce first. I wanted to simulate that moment when a cat is slowly twitching it, then a fast twitch right after. But it took sometime to get it figured out and as of now, it’s not really a cycle, but I’m planning on making it a full cycle by the time this is over. The only other cycle that is shown so far is the fire, and as said before it works as a rudimentary fire but looks way too fast right now, as you’ll see below. The book is another cycle, albeit, a very long one as I still need to then pull it back off the shelf so that when the video loops, it can fly back on. One of those slow cycles with a different rhythm. I think the best part of the whole thing so far, is the book putting itself back on the shelf. The turn of it is a little rough right now, but the idea is there and I love it. But using a Quad for the ease in looked the best as quint seemed to slow faster but take longer to stop just didn’t match what I wanted. But once I can get that turn of the book to look better, it’ll be pretty much done. I’ll probably need to learn how to masque things to keep that window pristine when the book flies off the shelf again. If I had more time, I would have made several books move on and off the shelf (which is why the bookshelf is so empty right now) but with how much time it is taking just to do the stuff that is already there, I feel that might be an ambition for another day.
But that’s all for today. See you next time!
