Working on a cat to eat the goat. No, cats don’t eat goats, but that’s what it says in the song.
Category: Animation
Waves and Locomotion
Most natural movements – runs, walks, gallops – follow wave patterns. But it’s very difficult for me to analyze such movements so I can recreate them in animation.
For this experiment I worked backwards, first creating the simple wave movements (above) and then combining them into a gallop (below).
The legs are swinging back and forth as well as waving.
I struggle to animate even a simple wave; it does not come intuitively to me. I found a way to remember with the letters C-Z-D-S. The curves of those letters resemble the 4 keyframes of a wave loop. If I can remember those 4 keyframes, I can tween from one to another by hand or in this case using Flash’s shape tweening.
One Little Goat
Blogger’s Quilt Festival – “Ziz” quiltimation in Art Quilts
Approximately 32″ square. Cotton fabric, cotton/bamboo batting, rayon thread. Machine embroidery, quilting, trapplique.
I’m submitting this in Art Quilts because there’s no “animation” category in the Blogger’s Quilt Festival. 😉 I’m happy to have it in an online show, because you can easily see it animated:
Each block of the quilt is a frame in the animated cycle above. I created the animation, exported as vector images which Theo Gray stitchcoded in Mathematica. Each block was stitched in 2 parts on our embroidery machine: first the Ziz (gryphon) figure, then the background. I cut out and applied the former to the latter and the machine “trappliqued” it down and did the echo pattern. Finally I zigzag stitched the blocks together, topstitched homemade bias tape over the seams, and bound it.
Stitch me closer tiny dancer
Embroidermation du jour: twirling dancer
Today’s embroidermation features a rotoscoped dance outtake performed by Reena Shah about 7 years ago for Sita Sings the Blues. Theo coded the stitches and the animated sin wave loop background. This is designed for larger quilts, but this version is tiny as it was stitched on our embroidery machine.
I sewed the 16 panels together like so:
The cycle is actually 13 frames long – an annoying number for animation. The final 3 frames are repeats so it could be a 4 x 4 square. Finished size is 16″ x 16″.