CAGD 493 Senior Portfolio Semester 2

      Taking advice from my peers and teacher, as well as watching a few videos on animation keyframing and timing, I've begun to get a better understanding on when and where to put keyframes for my animation.  Although I didn't get as much as I'd want to within the blogpost timeframe, I'm definitely getting a better workflow with the info I nabbed from last week.  I made sure to create two maya files that had my initial key poses, and one that had my over-keyed frames. And so, I went back to my initial key pose file, and got a bit more correct timing on Ralph's idle before eventually getting hit by the ball.  Now, I would like to explain what fixes I've made to the animation so far that my peers told me about: The twitch on the leg from before was fixed and refined, however one of the feet are a little still so I'll make sure to add more animation to it. I'm going to be working with a still camera from now on until next week, where I will ensure that th...

 I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing wrong during my stepped process, but I'm doing the exact thing I've been doing last semester. No, not the procrastinating part, but it's as if I'm keying too much like last time. This was my usual workflow in my other animation classes, however I'm not entirely sure how to key cleanly without feeling like there's too many gaps within my stepped frames. Important pose-to-pose animation really seems to be something I need to put more research into, as it feels very uncomfortable having empty spaces in-between my starting frames, but the moment I put in-betweens in, everything still seems disorganized (what I wouldn't do for a Source Filmmaker workflow). This week I was able to put in the in-betweens and make Ralph's poses a bit more expressive, or made it look kind of like a more fluid stepped process. Some trouble I'm having at the moment, besides adding too many keyframes, is jittery pose-to-pose transiti...

     For my first project, like I said, I wanted to start off with something simple to get the ball rolling. And so, a simple "important pose to important pose" work will do just that. I want to get this animation done as fast, and as efficient as possible, so if I can get this quick pose-to-pose practice done, and rendered a little fancy (since I grabbed an HDRI for some good lighting and a mini background), I think I'll feel pretty good to do a big second project.     So I've ultimately decided to use this very nice looking Raphael from TMNT rig ( Link ), and to create a back turn into wave animation. I have reference for the back turn, as well as the wave, however I could only get to the back turning with my stepped process so far. A strategy I've been trying to use to be more efficient is to count how many frames between each key pose in my reference, so that I'm not scrambling to find where I should put each key pose. Was I supposed to do that at the very...

 This semester, instead of taking my free time lightly and not using it to my advantage, I would like to feel more committed and inspired to create my animations as much as I appreciate looking at good animation. Instead of starting with a hard project, I would like to start with an idea that's as simple as possible, and build an animation that is catching to the eye off of it. Examples could be a waving animation, or some sort of victory posing (maybe like the default animation of a character in Overwatch's "Play of the Game") to work on my pose-to-posing. This would then refresh my memory on animation so that I can get back into the groove of things without stressing myself too much over an idea that could possibly take the entire semester. I would like to create several animations to further improve myself (in which would definitely be short gameplay or practice-esque animations), however if I can jog my memory on keyframing, stepping, etcetera, I would like to cre...