Today was pretty much a good day. I had to spend a fair bit of time fixing Dans issues with the rig, as he needed to be able to pivot the whole body from the head so Bare Bear could fall over properly from his upside down pose. I also needed to find a way around the facial expressions, as we discovered today blendshapes weren't working. Probably because we tried doing them now after we started animation, but as a solution (possibly temporary as Yaniv thinks he knows a way to do it) I fixed up the brows to all the characters with cluster deformers so we can animate the mesh directly. This works even if nothing else does.
So as for my own animation I made a fairly decent start today I'd say. I decided to scrap the idea of him starting in a sitting pose as it's going to take far too long to work a way around it. Instead I just started him off standing and scuffing his feet a bit. I have a long way to go, but I at least have some rough opening poses. I have been working mainly in stepped animation as it is more like industry practice, and I find it useful for blocking out poses. You can see above how it translates from stepped to spline, and you can also see what I mean when I say it needs more work. A lot more inbetweens.
While I've been finding this difficult because the actions of the bear in the dump are so vague, (dragging out roughly 700 frames of him "looking embarrassed and shy"), I have managed to get over my fear of animating today. Using a character set has definately helped as all I have to think about is poses for the time being, and keyframing is less complex than I remember.
Just as a laugh, Alec showed me a cool trick with the rig, and that is the "paper Bare Bear" look, made by scaling it on the Z axis. It looks awesome, and the animation still works, but it does go a bit crazy in places, so it's not really worth persuing as a genuine idea. Here it is anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment