Secrets - Part 05 (Finding my Finale)

click above to view. about 4mb.

Well, here it is.

Except for a few tiny spacing and timing adjustments, I was able to clean up all of my curves without too much of a hassle and get my arcs nailed down. It was the most painless time I’ve ever had of completing all of those finishing little touches, which makes me think either I’m getting the hang of this just a little bit, or that I got a lot of bit lucky. It took awhile longer than I had anticipated getting it done.

My mentor Dave Burgess left me two great major notes that I will incorporate into this piece. The first is that when she leans back in her chair, her shoulders and head hit at the same time. I will drag the head slightly. Great eye on that one and I wish I would have thought of that first! The second is that her dismissive hand gesture is a little big and I should scale down the anticipation a tad. I always had this feeling in my gut that it was a touch too in-your-face-ish and I'm actually kind of relieved he said something about it. Again spot on advice.

I started to rig and animate the pigtails on Sunday morning with just four hours to go until my deadline. I realize now just how incredibly rusty I am as a rigger. I got the right one working just fine but the left one was giving me a bit of grief. I will have to revisit it. Sad, because it’s seems to be just about the simplest thing to rig and I’ve tackled much tougher challenges in the past. Anyhow, I didn’t want to hand in sloppy work on her hair and have it distract from the main animation.

I’m about half way through animating her right pigtail. It really seems to add a lot to the piece. I will work on it over school break and have it done before class picks up again. So if you check my three-item list from last post, I only really finished one out of the three. But somehow, it doesn’t faze me much. I’m still very pleased with how it turned out. I find it very rare in both my professional and personal work to get the opportunity to work on something until you are more or less completely satisfied with it. It is surprisingly…satisfying.

So with a bit of reflection as I end my third quarter, it has been another just amazing semester at AnimationMentor. I can’t believe how much more confidence I have when approaching a shot. In addition, I really appreciate knowing how to plan and work it through to polish. This has been such an amazing experience that I will always be very grateful for. I look back and can’t believe that it has only been nine months so far. I can’t wait for the next nine.

I have been very lucky to get three mentors so far that I've had mountains of respect for and work very easily with. They have pushed and pulled me to new heights that I only dreamed of last year. It is always a bit sad to me to have the last critique from my mentors. I feel much closer to everyone in the school than I would have thought before I started. So this one is for DaveB, I hope our paths cross in the near future. Sniff.

I hope this finds you well and a big thank you for your interest.

Secrets - Part 04 (Rounding Third)

Click image to watch animation. 4 mb or so.

Well, I learned a big lesson after reading my last post, that I should never write in my blog at 3 am.

The animation keeps creeping towards the finish line. There are a few things that bug me about it but overall I think I’m ready to chase down all of my arcs and get everything smoothed out. I made some changes this week from last with some little flourishes. Stuff I really focused on this week is…

1. again, the hands. I tried to get little rotations and flexing when the weight was put on and taken off of them. No one will see it, but I’m in love with the tiny pinky compression on her left hand between frames 159-172. Little things like that make me love being an animator.
2. getting proper anticipation for some of the bolder body weight shifts
getting better arcs on the head
3. finding more little gestures to liven up the dead spots.

I find that a lot of the workflow techniques that I learned doing children’s edutainment translate very well when it comes to animating in Maya as well. I found myself using techniques to trouble shoot similar to what I do in my daily production chores as a pixel monkey. I’d watch my piece and make a list of notes of everything that was bugging me. My first pass through, my list was a solid page long (notes I take in a batman spiral notebook from the 80’s that I found in a box of my childhood stuff.) The second pass through, it was about a half of the page. By the third and fourth, it was less than a dozen notes each time. I think right now my list of notes is the following…

1. Around 204 when her hand settles on the table, it flaps in a distracting way. Perhaps it’s just the way that it catches the light, I don’t know but it needs fixing.
2. The eye darts at the end around 314 are too even and regular. I need to vary the spacing or timing to make them interesting again.
3. Her left hand sort of slides and slips off the table as she starts to feel defeated. It seems a bit too floppy/sloppy to me. I need to film reference and figure out how to make that look more natural.
4. I’m still on the fence a bit about my decision to drop both hands beneath the table at 305. I used to have one up and drop it while the other one landed on the table. Eventually, I found that distracting. I liked having a progression of her boldly all over the table. As she discovers that she is busted, I wanted her to reduce and slither back behind the table. The hands decision seems to play into that, I’m concerned about how plain her posture is at that point. Perhaps it works best though, as all focus wanders to the eyes, right where I want it at that point.

Once I get my list cleared of everything, then I will move forward on the outstanding tasks in the following order…

a. track and smooth out all those arcs once you get everything else resolved.
b. remodel, rig, and animate her hair. Those pony tails are begging for some motion.
c. throw some more environment in behind her, a bookcase or a window or some such.

And hopefully after that, it will be demo reel worthy. Only one week left before it has to be final. It still seems to me that there is a lot to be done on this piece. No matter how far I get, it seems that there are miles to go before I can sleep again. Next week will be a doozy, but I have most of everything done and smoothing arcs is kind of fun and relaxing.

It really hit home this week how amazing it is to see just how powerful some students animation can be if they rig it themselves to have facial controls. It makes me very excited to get a hold of the next rev of the model that incorporates all of that. Personally, I’m glad that I followed the school’s intentions and didn’t alter the model. I think not having facial controls really worked best for me because I know for a fact that if I had facial controls, I would have focused waaaaay too much on all of that. This experience has made me such a strong believer in communicating more through body posture and eye movement than mouth shapes and knitted brows. I learned a lot with this piece.

But with that being said, I hope that the lack of facial expressions and phoneme shapes don’t make it too junior to put on my reel. Perhaps I will be able to take AM’s new rig and apply the same animation data and throw in expressions and mouth shapes someday. But I can’t see myself having that kind of time in the next 9 months while school is in session.

I will just focus on getting through the next week of AM polishing work while staying lucid at my jay oh bee and trying to make my wife smile from time to time. Again thanks for the interest, and I hope this week finds you well.