[MBR] ILovePunCakes Vs. Digital

ILovePunCakes' Animation
[MEDIA=youtube]lX6uiwhGFcQ[/MEDIA]
ILovePunCakes' MBR Profile
http://maplemation.com/threads/gracelings-mbr-profile.34810/

So, I may be new on the form, but I want to voice why I think Digital won.

PunCakes, while having a longer video, had a few times I noticed things not feeling good in her animation. Maybe it was due to the longer animation and there for having more chances to slip up, but there were a few times I noticed that the anticipation to attacks was a little too quick. Along with that, a good bit of her attacks didn't feel very weighty, and just didn't feel as good as a lot of Digitals.

Digital, even with a shorter animation, had hits that felt weighty and what felt like good anticipation. His attacks felt like they had power behind them, that they weren't just there to progress the fight or be flashy. I felt that a lot with some of PunCakes, that some of the attacks felt kind of pointless or just to be flashy.

I do appreciate PunCakes trying some practical effects, like the flame cast on Digital's face in hers, but that is actually one I feel I need to count against her. While it was a good attempt, the fact the fire ball flickered yet the light cast wasn't made it feel unnatural and weird. Also, when Digital's eye had a flame, the fact it was an overlay that didn't mesh well with the style was a little off putting. Its clear PunCakes is a good spriter, or atleast I feel she might be due to some of the affects, so why this wasn't a transparent sprite thing kinda threw me off.



While I appreciate the length PunCakes had, and the time it must have taken to do such an animation, have 2 minutes of animation that feels like some aspects of animation weren't followed is not equal to 30 seconds of animation that followed most aspects of good motion.

Now I will stress, there were times that PunCakes did do some good anticipation and motion. I do appreciate those moments. And by no means is she bad. I just think in this one instance, the old saying (that yes was also said here and on the discord) is that quantity doesn't equal quality.


Also, additional note.
Reviewing the PunCakes animation again for some of the points made during this, I noticed something. About a minute and a half of the animation is the pre-fight set up. While by no means this is bad, I don't think this part should be taken into consideration for judging the two. Why? The majority of this part is still shots with minimal animation of characters talking to each other with either minute movements or facial expression changes. The most dynamic part of this bit is when Grace enters the mugging scene, and honestly that doesn't have much animation to it either.

Conclusion
By no means has this been to say PunCakes is bad or lazy in animating. I think having extensive review of an animation can really help. I do see parts I like in PunCakes, but the parts where motion just doesn't feel good or the anticipation is either far to short or practically nonexistant bug me. I see a great animator in PunCakes animation, but mistakes like the ones I noticed hold me back from saying she one. Quantity with Quality is always better then just Quantity, and while I'm not saying there wasn't some quality animation to PunCakes, the fluidity and force in Digitals honestly just feels much better.

(Would you believe me if I said I was a software engineer and not an Animation or English major? Me neither. Sorry for writing such a long thing, but I didn't want to leave any details out.)

ILovePunCakes said: (post #337417)

Thank you so much for the feedback. I tried out some new things during this animation and its clear that I need to work on a lot of things.

Hey, no problem.

Honestly, it was great if those were your first attempts! A little more practice, and next time you do an MBR or something I bet they'll be perfect.

Your honestly a great animator, just practicing anticipation and some more dynamic effects like how light might roll from a flame would greatly improve your future animations.

(Being fair, your leagues above me in being able to apply animation techniques to making animations. I'm still learning how to do animations, but I just know a lot about how animations should feel, due to watching way to many videos.)

Again, I'll restate my point from my first thing. Your seriously a great animator, and have a lot of skill. Practice will make you a lot, lot, lot better, and you should definetly do that. (As should I. Maybe should be back to that now instead of typing freakin' essays about animation principles, huh?)

I can clearly see that Grace put more time and effort into her animation, and tried a lot of new things while doing so, so kudos for that.
However, and while this obviously doesn't cover everything, grace's animation had quite a bit of issues that stood out enough to distract me, as well as the the fact that despite its decent setup, it ended in an awkward, abrupt fashion.
Digital covered his tracks better, so despite his animation's brevity, he gets my vote.

Both people did pretty good though imo

damn. ma boi digital ain't rusty as i thought ever since sublime faction

I'm surprised grace has improved a lot, her camera work is pretty stiff.I'm sure you will improve on that in future!
i can see that you animated a longer duration than digi,pretty alright ish but i'm not really entertained much

my vote goes to digi

Very nice work, you two!

For Grace, I'm usually a sucker for animations with story, however, felt kinda flat in how Grace and Miles' conversation scene flowed with her confrontation with Digital's character. They felt like two different scenes mashed together. There is also the issue with physics and while I do love the effort you put in, it felt distracting on how sometimes they were floating in mid-air overall.
And despite the map having more variety with buildings & a train passing by than Digital's green pastures and a walkway, the city still felt...empty to me in a way. It was only Miles, Grace, Neil, and Shulkle there. No other people were just walking by strangely. It could be really late at night, but I'd have expected something to go by to show life in the map.
I also recommend some much stronger fonts for the dialogue, like maybe Bebas Neue that encapsulates people to read it.

As for Digital, I think everyone else has said what I wanted to say. The physics were really well-done and can feel the impact of the punches, along with the camera work enhancing that experience. I really like the parallax on the map, despite it being a plain background, adding some moving clouds would really help out the overall look of the animation to me. However, Grace's running felt kinda slow, which took me off of the animation a little, along with the final hit on Grace was sorta odd, considering the sound of the punch implying a really hard impact on her, which should've broke the tile on where she landed a bit or at least some rock particles flying up around her. There is also the problem with the text's color being very hard to read, which I recommend white text with colored strokes.

Overall, I vote for Digital's animation.

And...although it seems everyone in the comments vote for Digital, it seems Grace's animation is the most voted. So I would really love for anyone who has voted for her to tell us why they believe her animation is superior to Digital's.

Good job, the both of you.

My vote goes to Digital, here's why:

Short, sweet and straight to the point. The animation was concocted at a decent pace, hits felt plentiful of impact, camera work was good.
The sound design was blanket and dull along with the map you set the fight up with. Basic hitsparks, nothing new. All in all, it was clean.

Here's why it didn't go to Grace:

Long and drawn out therefore more slip ups. The lighting wasn't my cup of tea, there are better ways to represent night time other than making the entire thing look dark. Your rigging was robotic and the character physics was all over the place — I didn't feel any impact from the hits. The way you go around using your effects are poor, some of them are just cut off. (See 1:31). Why are the explosions dark? They should be full of light, bright energy. Camera shakes were stiff. Either way, I feel as though I had to force my way through the whole thing.

Pros:

• Better map usage and background transitioning. Which is important to me, personally.
  
• Clearly more thought and ideas went into this fight than Digital's which is what I applaud you for — the execution just wasn't there.
  

There are a lot of things you need to work on such as the basic animation principles but you have an innovative thought process which every animator needs.

DMed this to Grace but will rehash here.

I’m just going to be straight up with you since that’ll help you much more going forward. The intro you made was pretty engaging with interesting dialogue. I’d spice up it more with more dynamic camera movement. Still camera shots with text can be boring or disengaging to the audience. As an animator you have to make sure what you’re creating is engaging to both you AND the audience.

Great job on cleaning up on some of the CnC I provided for you earlier. The transition to the Digital part looked much better after doing a slow transition. Gave the audience time to register that the scene is changing and gives an interval of reprieve for us to get adjusted. The guy that Digital was choking, I know I mentioned that should rig the body, and I did see that you put an effort. Whenever you’re doing rigs you should think about how bodies work in real life. Maybe act it out yourself/imagine the act or look up a reference. If he’s holding the body up there’s no way the body is just going to stay up there. Have the the body from the torso down sway or constantly move since the anchor point is at his neck. These things will help your text scenes seem that much more realistic and dynamic.

As for the fight, I’ll just go over that in DMs a bit more as there were several things that needed to be polished up on. Some fundamentals need to be revisted as the fight seemed lacking and jarring at parts, making it overall hard to follow.

Based on quality of animation alone, I’ll be voting for Digital. But really strong performance from you Grace! Can’t wait to see you improve.

Grace:

Spoiler

The text for the dialogue is too small. You should probably make it better so it's more comfortable to read.


Pay attention to small detail such as missing a frame in the layer such as:

For this:

You should add a fire effect before you just have that one pop in there suddenly. You should also add some sort of flicker effect over the fire too by making it a movieclip and putting an add blend over it while having it flicker by two to four frames in the movie clip.




So how is Andre behind her after she just punched him and sent him flying? You probably shouldn’t have your character stay in the same pose and instead find a pose that faces the other direction where she’s facing Andre. If you're going to add a dust effect after your character punches him, you should've indicated him crashing to a wall such as adding camera shake and a sound effect.


As the dust clouds went away, you could've faded them out.




Either don't have the camera zoom all the way out so it doesn't show the effect cutting off or use a different effect.




Physics. She should not be just floating in the air as if time was slowed down while Andre is flying and kicking her up in the air in normal speed which is also not good because that just isn't how physics work.




The background is moving while the ground looks like it isn't at all. You probably could've blurred it and have it move in a loop just like the background.




It would've looked better if the rocks were in front of him with a hit and dust effect added to it.




All of the build up with the skills before he just slides to the left in a very short distance was unnecessary. Also, these two effects conflict with each other so much. A fire skill with some dark dash right after doesn't fit very well. A very small and quick effect would work better OR he could've just leaped back.




I believe it would be better if he passed by the camera instead of it barely keeping up with him. It looked like he's walking too fast because the background is moving too quickly but when the camera is zoomed out, he's walking in normal speed.




The pause was dragged on for too long. You should shave some frames off.




You could've set the blend mode to add, so it doesn't have the black outline.






First off, again, pay attention to small details. I can see the end of that dark overlay (See the very top of this image). Second, why does he fade out and then



a... Drawn hole suddenly appear without any hit effects with the beam cutting off?


Overall

Here's something I noticed that recurs a lot in the animation, all of your tweens have NO easing in them and you have poor sound effect usage. You need to add anticipation when it comes to tweens. For example, during the motion before throwing a punch, you would ease in (-100) and after the punch, your character slides, easing out (100).

Digital:

Spoiler

Transition was weird. Instead of him sliding backwards you could've skew him diagonally downward to the left to the next pose.




Not sure if he's jump kicking up again instead of hitting the ground or he was supposed to and then jump kick. If he was supposed to land, you should probably added two to three frames of him landing, getting ready to kick her up to the air again.




The tech jumping (or whatever that was) was unnecessary. You could’ve had her just crash and slide into the ground then pick herself back up.




That transition was.. Weird. It looked like he was about kick with your foot up to her face but then suddenly he's in the middle of drop kicking her.




Another pose would've been better instead of him straight up doing a push up to jump into the air.


Overall:


There's a lot of negative space in your animation.



It would look better if your v-cam focuses on the characters instead of zooming all the way out.

My vote goes to Digital. Honestly, I see way too many problems in Grace's animation than Digital's.

Hi, I don't normally comment.. but I guess I want to clarify why I voted for Grace. As someone who doesn't really know much about fight animations, I just found her animation more interesting to watch, though probably not as well executed as Digital. It was more engaging to me, and I would have personally liked some more context from Digital's animation.

Sup. I'm Gay.
I voted for Graceling~!
Why?
Well
I like stories. Though Digi's animation was smoother and better animated, Grace's kept me engaged. I don't care much for fight choreography. To me it just looks like a bunch of flashing colors mixed with pixels touching each other....oh yeah that's what it is. That being said...That's ALL it is to me. So If you don't add more to it.....Then I'd find it boring. No offense, but the watch time for Grace's animation felt shorter than when I was watching Digi's even though realistically her's was longer. I was more into her's than Digi's. Love Ya, Digi, You still did great. It was really just a matter of preference for me.
I also took into consideration the amount of experimentation that Grace did. I found that to be bold of her. She tried new things, rather than sticking with what she already knows how to do (taking the easy route).

I don't really have much to say for Digi because I don't know much about fight animations.

Congrats on your win Digital.
I'll update your profile soon.