Arrrr! Land Ahoy!

Well this is the last post I will probably ever make on this particular blog. The assignment would have gone much more smoother if I didn't have distractions, like other assignments and the internet. Still, I've learnt a lot from this unit.

As you will recall I picked roughly a ten second bit from the Battle of Wits, beginning from "Alright, where is the poison?" and finishing at "And find out who is right, and who is dead". Lets have a watch now.



As always I wish I had more time, less characters to animate and something other than walking aimlessly for Buttercup to do. I didn't have enough time to do a lip sync, but might do it over the summer so I can enter it as a portfolio thing.

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.

The future is bleak

Here is the animated storyboard.



It's not much, I wanted to put the audio file on it and queue everything up, but After Effects was being annoying about .mp3 and .wav files. Also the quality of the scanner was questionable, but you get the idea.

Ooh, Shiny

This is the Mannequin picking up a coin.



With this animation, the character is at a distance and sees the coin. It then walks up and crouches down to pick it up. I don't like the walk cycle I used it is a bit iffy. I think I should have used a few extra key frames.

Ta Daa

Here is the Mannequin Rig pushing a ball off a table.



Now I had to add an extra block so the watcher can't see the models legs. I should have made the table a bit thinner and closer to the ground. When the ball falls off I neglected to animate the character further, instead focusing on the bouncing ball.

We Now Return You to Your Interrupted Program

Well it has been quiet some time since I last posted, mainly due to the amount of work other units seem to be taking up, however I do have everything done.
So
The next posts have the following:
Pushing a ball with the Mannequin rig
Picking up a coin (as above)
and
Storyboard in animation format

I will also include a post critiquing how I am going at the moment with the assignment, as well as my overall work.

Enjoy