Swing rotoscoping vs behavioural animation

To learn how to better animate characters for my research project,  I decided to take one type of movement and try to animate it in different ways. By doing this I hope to learn which type of animation is quicker, more efficient and gives the better looking result.

For this test, I decided to animate a character swinging around a pole before falling off. I started by making the following video in the behavioural animation program Endorphin.

After this I tried to keyframe the same type of animation but came across one of the main problems of keyframe animating. In order to make a realistic looking animation, you need good reference material to work from, but I had trouble finding reference videos that matched up with the previous animation. While I did manage to find some videos of people swinging around poles, they didn’t match up exactly with the Endorphin animation I made before. One of the videos I found did capture the same basic movements though, so I decided to to try keyframing that.

Here is the reference video I managed to find:

And here is the keyframed animation I made by looking at that video:

 

Rotoscoping Test

For my research project at university, I’m looking into different methods of character animation in order to find out which method is best in which cases and to help me make the right decisions about how to animate characters in future projects. Here is a test video of some keyframed rotoscoping I did of a man getting up and walking forward.