XD it really captures him well, this is a great animation ya did.

Bouncing pecs, who would've thought?

Oooh, that seems really fun!!! Will wanna try!~ :D

Well hot damn, that class really did pay off.
The dynamic angle shows off a lot of emotions and is my fav angle.
(was also great fun to see the head swell from the landing)

Thank you! The dynamic angle is my favorite too. It was a lot of fun animating their facial expressions, and I was hoping people would catch Rec's head expanding for a few frames as he's crushed between a moose and a hard pec. I think that a bit of cartooniness can really help an animation stand out, especially in 3D where it's very easy to be too stiff and rigid.

THIS... THIS... THIS IS PERFECTION!

Very nice animation, and totally my kind of thing. Were this to happen to me, I'd probably to dive in between Dan's pecs after a bounce or two, because true paradise lies within.

just can't get over how good those two look as they bounce about. the animation is so clean! how did you map the motions so perfectly?

I went big to small, coarse to fine. I started by blocking out the key poses, which were relatively simple in this case: the points where Rec and Marvin were in contact with the pec and then the points where they were at the top of their arc in the air. I focused on getting the trajectory and angle of their bodies looking right before worrying about the fine details. Then I added frames to the contact points with the pecs so that they moved when the pecs bounced up to launch them. After that I just went in and refined things more and more; adding poses like Marvin grabbing Rec when he lands on his back or Rec gaping in pain when the giant moose unintentionally slams on top of him, fixing their poses to avoid clipping into Dragon Dan or each other, and then refining their expressions and so on.

I also made sure to keep things simple as much as possible; I deleted redundant keyframes, animated on only two axes (Rec and Marvin only move up and down and left and right relative to Dragon Dan, they don't move any closer or farther from him at all), and worked to keep things organized and simple. I originally had both Rec's and Marvin's arms and legs in IK mode, but I soon realised that it was too messy trying to animate their hands and feet to go along with the body, so I used a script to transfer the poses I had set up to FK mode and refined them from there, which ended up being a lot easier. The nice thing about animating loops is that if you nail the first frame, you can copy it to the last frame and everything just becomes a matter of smoothly going away from it and then smoothly coming back to it.

More than anything, though, it just takes practice. I spent the last semester learning how to animate characters for video games and that uses all of the same core principles as animating for film. Doing walkcycles and runcycles definitely gives you a feel for looping animations, and technical knowhow goes a very long way for helping toubleshoot issues with your rig or planning out the motion you want.

i like the tiny one being crushed XD

Very nice animation!

This is so silly <3 love the expressions on the guys bouncing! You did an amazing job at animating their expressions

Amazing work as always bud, cant wait to see what else you will do

Thank you! It was fun making this, and now that animating is a lot less intimidating for me I hope to make more in the future!

The animation won’t work for me ;-;

The links all seem to work on my end. You're not trying to play the animation here on FA, are you?

amazing job here! <3