Absolutely stunning. I’ve been studying F.A.C.S a fair bit as recommended by several other TD’s, but this method of utilizing and implementing it into a workflow is simply stunning.

Argh I can’t believe it, I’ve officially submitted an assignment late now, and by two hours. I was a foolish procrastinator assigning some other work related issues to take my priorities early in the week. So I honestly didn’t really get going on this till Saturday, and there’s no one to blame but myself, but of course as fate would have it crunching is when problems arise. First as has been the case on most assignments the first hour or two is starting the assignment, and then not liking at all what I’ve done, trashing it and starting over. this has happened pretty much every time. Then, as I blocked and then refined the ball of tailor, I had the intention of doing a 180 turn as he jumped against a wall. This didn’t work to well as I got all my timing and spacing and rotations on X, squash and stretch etc done first, with the plan to rotate him on Y after, only to discover the rig isn’t really designed for that. As a TD I should have known to check the rig and add a secondary parent first to make it possible. Fail! Well fortunately I dissected the setup enough to realize a simple cheat especially since tailor has no textures or special features to define direction other than the tail, was to simply animate the Y offset in the orient constraint. It worked out quite well.

I then also ran into a major hurdle throughout all the animating of the tail. I animated the tail straight ahead on 1′s for the whole project, but Maya seemed to just freeze up after a while doing this, I have no clue why. It Meant saving incrementally often, but even then I constantly had to shut Maya down and start up again, and no matter what I always lost a frame or two of work.

So one assignment late, I’m not to happy with myself for that, fortunately the punishment is a loss of a letter on my grade, and I’m not really taking this course for marks overall, but the education. As long as I don’t do it again and make sure I never end up on probation. Of course that means the rest of Sunday has been a busy day starting on my next assignment, because next weekend I’m flying to Germany on important business, but that means I won’t even have a Saturday or Sunday to even work on this weeks assignment.

What is most exciting for me though is that I finally found a way to be able to select controllers through the infernal rotation gizmo. It does require sacrificing the ability to freely tumble in all axis when clicking inside of the rotation gizmo, but honestly that’s a sure fire way to hit gimble lock anyways and I always have advised users never do that in CINEMA 4D, so the same goes for animating in Maya. To set this up simply double click on the rotation tool icon to bring up its options, and you should see one called “Center as Virtual Trackball.” Turn this off an now when you click anywhere inside of the rotation gizmo you get your selection box. This alone improved my workflow on the Tailor rig dramatically. What I find most interesting is every Maya user I’ve brought up this frustration with had no solution, I had suggestions like growing and shrinking the gimzo with the + and – keys, and my one classmate Paul brought up using the Q key to turn off the gizmo, which works but then you need to activate rotate again. Granted I will give everyone I talked to credit that the name isn’t the most obvious either. Anyways, as I learn more and more options and prefs I am making Maya usable, which I guess is what happens as anyone dives deeper into an app.

Man week six already. You know the problem with starting AM in the first week of January is that AM basically becomes your week counter, every new lesson is the next week, and I’m the kind of guy that likes to not now what day of the month it is let alone what week. I’m all to aware of how fast time is moving now, it is really messing with my mind.

Now that I have that off my Chest, noting too much this week, the platform with a pendulum is nothing new to me, like the old tail swing assignment at VFS. I do have to say though that while this was an assignment I was prepped for, this was the best lecture I’ve seen yet from the AM guys. Not only was it a little sorter than the standard which, well watching 1 hour lectures is a little tougher when your alone in your house watching a computer monitor. No the best part was their explanation on the various kinds of overlapping. All the terms they used I’ve heard and read before in talking about overlapping action, but sort of willy nilly treating them all as the same kinds of things, but these guys have actually carefully classified what each type of overlapping action is. I really liked that.

A little warning this one has Audio, I thought I’d choreograph it to some music, a small clip from Road to Eldorado.

This assignment was interesting for me too as I’ve noticed that I’m naturally just using the graph editor for all my animating so far on the bouncing balls and even the platform in this assignment, that when I began animating the pendulum, I was still shifting my keys in the graph editor instead of the dopesheet. for that type of offsetting of keys the dopesheet is so much easier, but I’m becoming so used to using the graph editor that i didn’t even think about it. It was an interesting epiphany for me as in any animating I’ve done before my process has been using the CINEMA 4D timeline a lot, and only touching curves when I needed to. I hope I can start to utilize my spline workflow in CINEMA 4D (well easier in C4D in fact because its tangent workflow is a little more intuitive)

No Sketch this week, but I also managed to do some revisions, fortunately I used a constraint setup to animate my ball last week so adjusting timing and such was easy without having to worry about how the ball interacts with the half pipe since its position was defined by the constrained object. Nothing new in the start, just the timing and how far it travels along the pipe on certain rolls. Also an update to the devastation pose, pretty minor was mainly trying to reduce the notch in his back, but wasn’t able to do much because of how he is weighted.

Well now on to week 7, and sure enough, its the first part of a two parter on Spline Editing in the Graph editor with Victor Navone, sweet.

Well this was a rough but enjoyable lesson. Restarted it several times wasn’t happy with the angles of bounces and often tried to do so much there simply wasn’t time for it all. I also wanted to focus on some interesting interaction between the ball and one of the moving pieces of the obstacle courses rather than just smacking it or getting hit by it spinning.

The reason I did enjoy this despite the problems, was because I started to really get comfortable with the Graph editor in Maya. Now this doesn’t mean I like the graph editor in Maya, I think its annoyingly tedious and primitive with way to many steps for common functions and needs. That said I’m getting comfortable enough to work with it, and that was one of my goals in doing Animation Mentor, becoming more familiar and comfortable with Maya. Bret and I have been talking and we’ll be doing some comparisons and more indepth look at CINEMA 4D’s Fcurves to show some of the stuff we think Maya is lacking. That said I do love the Insert key function, its something greatly lacking in CINEMA 4D. To add a curve with no affect whatsoever on the curve is a great thing, and was essential in modifying my revisions of last weeks assignment below.

And of course we cannot forget Stu, this week he was devastated the poor guy

I can’t believe it has been a month already. Between work and Animation Mentor time is flying. Work was strangely busy and pretty tiring this week, I was supposed to do employee reviews with my staff, and it was busy enough I never really found the time to get two of them done all week. Being so busy and having so much going on, I’m pretty disappointed with the time I had for AM this week. It is not a good sign to be falling behind and crunching to get assignments done. Sadly I did some revisions on my previous assignments, but I didn’t upload them ahead of time, and was tweaking this weeks assignment until about 15 minutes before noon, which is when our assignments are due.

Of course just as they always warn at AM upload early and don’t crunch because technical problems can be lead you to not getting an assignment in on time. Sure enough with 15 minutes left I’m all ready to render out my playblast, and an odd display error I’d seen once or twice had shown up in my playblast. Something odd was going on with my NURBS spheres. First thing I tried was simply shifting my view a little as that typically solved it when I encountered it during animating, but to no avail. I next tried settings that seemed like they would be affecting those polygons, and sure enough backface culling fixed it. Perfect right? I add my Animation Mentor Shot mask, and sure enough, the shot mask doesn’t work right when backface culling is on, so I had to turn backface culling off. I tried High Quality rendering, which again fixed the balls, but killed the shotmask, I guess it also uses backface culling automatically. so it came down to priorities, do i hand in an assignment with funky looking balls, or no shotmask with frame counter. The balls are the focal point so they took precedence and with that I got my assignment and planning image in with 1 minute to spare.

Sadly that one minute was not enough time for me to re-encode my revisions however, so already, poor planning, exhaustion and sure even a little plain old laziness I’m sure, has possibly hindered my mark a little. In the end though I’m not doing AM for the marks, but the education, so understanding the feedback, what and why I should improve things, is more important than upgrading my marks a little, as long as I’m not failing or handing in late.

Anyways my latest animation, and no poses of Stu, for Lesson 4.