Friday 27 February 2015

FMP- Alpha (Creature Scene)

Just a reminder, here is the animatic for the creature scene...


First Block:


Here we have the first block for the creature scene. This took me quite a long time to get right but I felt that the poses were very important here. I wanted a nice silhouette throughout this piece for the creature and I really wanted to hit those key poses. 
I really struggled with this blocking as the rig was quite challenging to work with. We initially had a lot of issues with some of the controllers and the rig did not like being referenced into Maya 2015 however we got it to work in the end, it just pushed us all back a little time wise. 

First Spline: 


Again, first spline is pretty ugly and I think I need to do a lot of work to get some weight into this piece. I have had a lot of trouble with the legs and shoulders when using this rig. The anatomy of the creature means the neck is very large and unfortunately doesn't deform to the nicest shapes. I tried my best to make the poses appealing (with as little clipping and glitching as possible) while still making the movement believable. Hopfully, the more I work into it, the better it will get. 

Spline:


After the first spline, I moved the landing position of the creature so he covers more ground with his jumps. Getting the last run to look right took me a lot of time playing around. The problem was he is a big creature so if he doesn't cover much ground with each stride, it looks odd. On the other hand, his legs are very tiny, so there is only so far they can stretch before it just looks like im making him fly across the screen. I am quite happy with how it looks now and I am excited to get some nice overlap animation done and really smooth out the curves. 

Overlap:


Here I really tried to work on making his movements fluid but weighted. I had fun adding some character and emotion with his ears. Its a little difficult again as I cant animate the eyes until the body animation is done and I also cant see what the totem glow looks like (the glow of the totem is what scares him away) So its a lot of guess work but I am over all happy with the way it is progressing. 

Facial Anim: 


Finally I got to work on the facial animation and really add some character and expression to the creature. We had a little trouble again with the eye textures as some didnt want to work, so the range of eye animation was quite limited however I still think it works and I am pleased with how they look. 

I will be uploading the finished rendered version in another post once they are done.

Friday 13 February 2015

FMP- Alpha (Character Scene)

Now to begin animation!! 

Just a reminder, here is the animatic for the character scene...


First Block:


Blocking was fairly simple for this piece, no complex poses and im pretty happy with the timing. 
Note: we are having animated textures for the eyes so they I will have to animate them last. They are pretty intense on the pc and bog down the file and make it pretty impossible to animate so im going to have to get everything for the body done first and then animate the eyes. Its a little different to what im used to but hopefully it will work out. 

First Spline:


This is always the part I hate, so many glitches and nasty floaty bits. I have a lot of smoothing to do and I have to fix that hand but im quite happy with this as a basis to work on. I think i'll be spending a lot of time cleaning up the graph editor with this one.  


Facial Animation:


[Sorry about the curves on show here] This is a different angle to see the facial animation as the render camera it quite far away. Here are the dreaded animated eye textures....they were quite a handful to work with. These took a lot of time to get working and I'm still not entirely sure how they work, however I really like the look of them so I think they were worth the effort. 

Final Shot:


And here we have pretty much the final shot before rendering (you can see all the render cameras here) I had a lot of fun with her bouncy hair and her facial expressions with this shot. We did have a lot of trouble with the rig though and some things (like her bracelet) had to be cut out as they were just not working. A few more tweaks and I think we will be there

I will make a separate post for the final rendered shots of them both, but for now, its out of my hands and off to the techy people to do their magic to make it look pretty.