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:

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas, and wish you all a happy and prosperous 2010. Or, in Stitch form: