CAGD 493 Senior Portfolio Semester 2

          This could definitely use more cleanup, but here's a confident splined version of the game animation I was working on. With a lot of animation layers and adjustments to the root of the rig, I was able to get a decent looking preview of what could possibly be a (near) finished 60fps animation.     The footing is still extremely hard to keep in place cleanly, as using the root control's rotation curve (or controller) makes for extremely obnoxious offset work that I have to do. I desperately need to find a way to rotate a character within a rig cleanly without offset work and having to do complete animation overhauls with animation layers.     Actually nevermind, I think I have a solution (for another animation of course...): I suddenly remember a few behind the scenes videos on YouTube where people would do the root translation and rotation first in blocking, then pose on top of those rotations, rather than doing the posing and t...

      Well, it's basically almost the end of the semester, so instead of attempting to move to another animation, I think I'll just improve on these two animations that I've been working on this semester.      This week I've re-keyed my key poses to be more organized, and so that I don't use the root controller as much as I did last time. Using the root and it's rotation root control offset for the Ms. Fortune rig made it very hard to switch to splining for this project, thus making hard to progress in general. I can have good poses as much as I want, however if I don't correctly use the rig, the blocking process won't aid the overall splining of the product. This is also a problem with my Raphael rig. I believe I'll need to look more into other animator's blocking process; Maybe after stepping, I delete the root control transforms and work on animating the character in place? It sounds weird, but if other animators are doing this process, this m...

      Progress is not the best for the millionth time. It seems like my way of animating can look good (with good camera work), however isn't as organized as it could be.      Last class had discussed the head of the character being a little too wobbly or faster than the body, so that was fixed, as well as the foot bouncing as if the kick was done on a bouncy surface, in which was fixed. However, as I'm trying to move to splining, I seemingly can't get to this phase, mainly because I've offset the root control and rotate root (?) control too much from the overall animation of the character, thus creating a mess of trying to fix the root, then the character itself, and vice versa. Also for the tail, the animation looks good stepped, however when moved to spline I realize that the stepped poses of the tail do not fit as correctly as the orthographic view shows. I attempted to make my own tail poses that stray away from the source material, but to no avail. An...

      So the animation timing for Skullgirls is very fast, and trying to replicate it through stepping is easy, however switching to three dimensional splining, I realize that that sort of speed for that much motion would go too fast to the point that no detail can really be seen in the upwards kick (at least in my opinion). And so, I've decided to add my own timing, plus a few more keyframes, to a sort of brand new stepped progress.     I added a mini stumble or a few hops after the upwards kick reaches it's maximum height, and then droops back down while the character eases back into a more comfortable position, then I added holds to when both feet are planted on the ground, and the anticipation into the idle pose. I may or may not be working in 60FPS, so whenever I switch to 60FPS x 1 (I believe), the animation plays a little too fast. So I'll see what I can do with altering the timing a bit better. Knowing that I've already been using animation layers and fi...

      Hello! I was luckily able to find a solution to the problem I had with my rig not stepping correctly!      …It was because I didn't read the readme.txt provided that told me to install their rig plugins (oops). Well anyway, I did some really good progress on the actual stepping of my animation. Especially noting that not having the plugins didn't allow me to step it without it auto-splining. I'm just now doing a pretty good job on improving my time management and was able to get some progress done, and to feel good about what poses I was able to key.     I was able to get my poses down as close as the source material as possible, with a few changes so that the transition from 2D to 3D looked smooth in my stepping. I tried splining it so I have an idea of what it would look like, and realized that I have to step and or make my tangents linear to ensure that a transition from IK to FK is smooth.     Knowing that I have to make a very...

      So, I'm not exactly liking my progress towards my TMNT animation, as the workload was greater than I expected. I over-keyed his stumbled movement at the beginning, and while attempting to cut the animation short, I've seemingly made him react to the ball impacting his face way too fast, and it is pretty frustrating to try and stretch out the keyed frames for the turn around. And so, I will put it off for the moment and work on my next animation, which will be an easier approach to adding to my senior portfolio.     I wanted to proceed with a game animation next; I realize that actor, cutscene, and or animated picture-esque animation takes some time to really look and feel fluid, even with it possibly being only around 10 seconds or lower. The amount of emotion and exaggeration you have to put into the poses, and transitions between poses is crazy, and so I'd like to continue with a miniature game animation.      In a few of my classes, it wa...