Progress

So far I have done the first blocking cycle of the animation. I tried to render it out and create an .avi file but VirtualDub is not really helping me out, as a fellow student recommended. I will ask him to help me with that and hopefully I will be able to post it here.

My blocking technique is the hybrid one. So every 3-5 frames I key frame a pose. Then I change the graph so everything is flat. I don't want Maya to ruin the inbetweens until I have done a few needed ones myself.

Hopefully, when I go through a second time Maya will be nice to my animations and do what I want. If not, I'll have to go through it and manually correct mistakes.

The Story So Far

So that is what I have been doing these last couple of weeks. I know it could definitely use more work, but I only did some of the things in thirty minutes to an hour. If I had more time during the week for refinement the animations and poses would look much better.

The Mannequin animation challenged me a bit, because there is really no face to express. So turning the head to look at something was kind of pointless because it still looks the same. It was a good idea though to have a featureless model, as it forced the user to get better at expressing the characters thoughts and feelings.

The Andy Rig was alright to use. It had a lot more controllers but the facial expression were a bit hard to use. To see the eyebrows you had to render it so you knew what it was expressing. My other main grip was the elbow and rotation controls for the wrists. It was sometimes very difficult to get the pose that you wanted. The elbows and wrists flipped at times, so that was frustrating.