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.

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!