Grr, so my webhosts suddenly completely changed my FTP security arrangements to cut down on password sniffing. Which would normally be fine, except that they also neglected the minor detail of telling me!! Suffice to say I'm mildly peeved, but at least it means I haven't been hacked, which is what I initially feared...
Anyways, I'm back in business! So, what's new? I'm currently working on a multi-character sequence (at least two characters, spread over at least 3 shots, which must be 12-15 seconds long, and feature lip-sync). It's been a great challenge (not to mention emotionally draining!), but it's different from my normal animated fare, and it's been a lot of fun so far. It's certainly got a long way to go, but here's how it looks as of this evening:
Huzzah! This shot is finally finished! (disclaimer: nothing is ever finished in animation, here "finished" is a relative term that should be taken to mean that no further handins are needed. This animation may also contain trace amounts of nuts. No animals were harmed in the making of this production. Your statutory rights are not affected by this nonsense rambling. In case of doubt, please seek legal advice).
Bruised, bloodied, and desperately in need of a good break, somehow I clawed my way over the finishing line and finished class four... I must say it was one helluva relief to finally get a break - after what's now been a full year of AM (whilst simultaneously working on Avatar), a breather was quite definitely in order! It's been nothing short of delicious to be able to once again go for bike rides, spend whole days curled up by the fire with a good book, and meet up with friends without that nagging guilty voice at the back of my head...
But of course all good things must come to an end, and from Tuesday morning both AM and work start again. So, before I disappear once more into the murky depths of Maya, here's how my final acting shot turned out:
In class five we finally start looking at facial animation and lip-sync properly, and my first task will be to take this shot and to start adding "proper" facials on top. The rig we were given in class four only had very limited facial controls to keep us focused on body language - we could make the character blink and open/close his jaw, but that was it. It's actually surprisingly tricky to make an emotion read when you can't use the brows, or sculpt the eyelids at all - I had to do a lot of careful head tilting and eye framing to make it work so far. By contrast, I was quite surprised how well the jaw works even without full lip-syncing - it already feels "mostly there", even though I haven't even touched the lips yet. Funny old thing, this animation business...
And of course, as is traditional, here's a reel of all my work so far at AM:
Aloha! Our story resumes on my first acting shot - which is all polished up and allegedly "finished" now. I say allegedly, because I couldn't polish it up quite as well as I'd hoped to - some unexpected six-day weeks were required at work to finally push Avatar out the door, and six day weeks have a well-established track record of playing merry hell with my AM assignments... So this one will probably need some more polishing love at some point:
At the moment we're on our first dialog shots, which is incredibly exciting! Our first task was to find three sound clips, and film ourselves acting them out. It was actually really great fun (especially the more psychotic line, which is slightly worrying!!):
Generally people seemed to enjoy the second clip the most, so that's the one that I chose to go ahead with. However, I'm not gonna post last week's first blocking of it, since it was... *ahem*... rubbish. I hit "the wall" last week, and had real trouble focusing on my assignment. Burnout is thoroughly unpleasant at the best of times, and I'm actually quite surprised this is the first time I've hit it whilst at AM. A gentle week with plenty of sleep and book-reading seemed to work wonders though, and and I'm now much happier with the direction it's going in:
Suffice to say I'm mildly peeved, but at least it means I haven't been hacked, which is what I initially feared...
I must say it was one helluva relief to finally get a break - after what's now been a full year of AM (whilst simultaneously working on Avatar), a breather was quite definitely in order! It's been nothing short of delicious to be able to once again go for bike rides, spend whole days curled up by the fire with a good book, and meet up with friends without that nagging guilty voice at the back of my head...
