Cold feet

I got a good amount of the re-edit in Premiere done this weekend. That's about it, unfortunately. I feel like I am avoiding doing the animation that I need to do next, almost like my subconscious is panicking now that I actually have all of the assets that I need to get most of the film done. It's trying to find a way for me to get stuck on some minor detail, but there aren't any details left. It's an open road, I've got a full tank of gas, but my foot nervously hovers over the gas pedal. Almost like it is too good to be true. Hopefully writing this will help me overcome that feeling.

Frame by frame

So I got my walkcycle animation set up to be properly synchronized with all the particle effects and other RCT3 factors that I can't directly control (not always an easy task), and chugged out 150 frames/5 seconds of final footage! Woohoo!

It kinda seems sad that I am celebrating over getting just 5 seconds of my film done, but hey, at least I am making progress.

In other news, my college classes continue to be ten times more fun than regular schoolwork. Using Adobe Illustrator, I am tracing over the robot sketch that I posted a while ago. I'll post that when it is finished.

Productive Procrastination

So I just finished some really productive procrastination. When I was going to be working on a paper, I worked on the walk-cycle and got it to a presentable-enough-to-film-it level. And now I can work on my animations more this week, unless a boatload of unexpected stuff happens, because I just finished the paper! But I think I'm going to go to sleep now.

Practical animation

I remembered something I read a long time ago today. It had to do with computer animation. It was one successful animator's specific workflow (can't remember who it was). Basically, he animated the body first, completely ignoring the legs, and then animated the legs after he got the motion he wanted with the body. I remember thinking that it was a really good idea to try once I started animating stuff. I had forgotten about it until today. That's what I've been doing, and it seems like it might work. I've got the body animated the way I want, and I've only just begun to see if I can get the legs to follow along in a believable way, but I am hopeful. It really does make sense to do the body first, since shots in films tend to focus on the face/head first, the body second, and the legs might be included if the shot is wide enough, but they are almost never the center of attention. So why let them define your animation? Well, that's exactly what I had been doing up until now... I was animating the legs first, and it was making my character look completely weird. Even if I don't get the legs looking completely perfect, though, I think I will still be able to use this animation. The particular shot I want it for doesn't actually show the legs most of the time anyways (surprise, surprise!).

Animation and editing

Over the past few days I have completed and filmed 321 frames of animation for The Battle for Axis Mundi. It could have been even more than that, but unfortunately the new model's walk cycle has me a little bit stumped. I kept re-doing it and it kept coming out wrong, so I need to figure out what is up with that. I think part of the problem is me thinking that IK constraints would solve ALL of my problems. While it is true that they make feet stick to the ground, it's not true that they auto-magically make your animation look realistic. In fact, I think it is just as easy to make an unrealistic animation with them as without them. With IK it looks like your character is a puppet who has no muscles, and without them it looks like a person who's feet don't seem to care that two pieces of matter cannot occupy the same space at the same time (note however that well-animated characters don't necessarily give a second thought to the laws of physics either!). Overall though, once I get better at animating them, I think IK rigs will make the animation process a lot easier.

Oh, and since I was having such a hard time on that particular animation, I continued working on the re-edit in Adobe Premiere. The green-screening is SO much cleaner! Everything looks better than ever!

IK, You K, We all K.

I have now (kinda) figured out how to animate using constraints, including IK constraints. Makes a lot of stuff easier. For a while I was having a hard time getting the constraints to bake, but I've got it sorted. My first animation with my new model is now working successfully in RCT3, so I'm going to go to bed and then start animating and filming as much as I can tomorrow.

Sketching And Stuff

Good news/bad news time! The bad news is that I haven't gotten to work on Axis Mundi very much this weekend. I have been writing a paper for one class, and sketching a robot for another. The good news is that you get to see the robot!

It's a giant, inquisitive, nuclear powered, teleporting, exploration robot! Or at least those were the parameters I was given to work with. Hopefully I have adhered to them closely enough to get a good grade. Those little probe things are the teleportation part, by the way. The idea is that they can zap stuff into the compartment on the back of the robot, so that it can be studied by people inside.

The return of the Titanicus

So my laptop was returned to me on Monday, presumably with a new graphics card (Is there really anyway to know if it is a different one or not?). I'm really glad that it is back. The keyboard is so much easier to use. It's tactile feedback is insanely superior than the keyboards in the public lab. Oh, and editing in Premiere on my laptop is smoother than on the desktop workstations that my University provides. Yeah. It's an awesome laptop. That's why I named it "Principio Titanicus." (Don't ask me what that means, I just thought it sounded awesome.)

Anyways, hopefully I'll be able to work on Axis Mundi stuff more this weekend. Pretty small update, I know, but I just realized today that I hadn't made a post about my laptop being back.