Filming by the book

Today I have been animating and filming according to my animatic. Here's me comparing my shot in RCT3 to my animatic, in order to make adjustments:

So yeah, that pretty much explains what I've been doing and will be doing until I get to the end of my animatic. Then I'll just make it up from my head as I animate and film.

In other news, I've received grades for the art and digital media assignments that I posted earlier. The art project (The December Render) got a 97.5%, and the animatic got a 113%. Although, I didn't really get credit for the extra 13%, because that's not the way that the school's grading system works. The professor just happened to have a grading scheme that can go over 100%, because extra credit is built into it. Obviously I didn't really need extra credit, though.

Alignment Issues

Over the past week I've gotten 100 frames of animation done, imported, and filmed in RCT3, and about 100 more animated only. The second 100 frames are proving difficult to import, because there are two different rigs interacting with each other. In theory, this shouldn't be a problem, because I have technically done the same thing in an older shot. When I did it before, though, there was one complex armature and one armature with only one bone. Right now I am trying to import two complex armatures. They don't want to import in the same scenery file, so I have tried separating them, but there are major alignment issues that I have yet to fix. As I write this post, I think I recall that when I animated interaction between two models before, I imported them separately as well. So I should probably focus my efforts on correcting the alignment problems, instead of trying to get both animations to import in the same scenery file.

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 Weekend

I managed to make 240 frames of animation this weekend. Exciting times! Maybe the film will start really moving along now. And as far as the texturing goes, I am getting used to the way that it looks, and I actually think it is quite close to what I had imagined it would look like in it's final form. By the time that I finish animating this shot and film it in RCT3, I probably will not have any doubts about using it as the final texture. Sometimes I'm not sure whether it is good or bad when that happens. By "that," I mean the phenomenon where I make something, don't really like it, but I don't change it for a long time, (possibly because I can't [like this instance]) and then later on I decide to keep it that way just because I have gotten used to it. In the worse case scenario, that would be blinding myself to how cruddy a portion of work is, and in the best case, it doesn't really matter and by letting go of my perfectionism I save time. I hope this instance is the second one.

Clear to proceed

I am tentatively proceeding with the animating and filming of the rest of the scenes for The Battle for Axis Muni. The model that I was texturing is presentable, so instead of spending hours agonizing over how I can't get it's texturing to look better, I am starting to animate it. After all, I can always fix the textures later if I feel like they absolutely need to be improved.