A crazy week this week, with all the added expenses of AM and Amanda’s apprentice ship, I’ve been considering doing some freelance and sure enough a great project that I can’t really talk about came along. Unfortunately its a really intensive project, but will really challenge me. That does mean that I’m now working two jobs and school at the moment and my sleep has been really messed up since I got back from Germany, so a lot of random sleep and headaches this week.

This week was another two parter assignment with the first week again being the blocking of the walk, but this time with Character. Next week we’ll refine the walk and render our first assignment form a 3/4 view with perspective.

Of course with such a busy Week even Stu is exhausted.

And with only blocking this week I managed to squeeze in revisions.

Well this time I had to crunch after getting back form Germany, but that didnt’ stop me from accepting an invite to a guys poker night on Friday, Thanks Guys it was great.

I’m getting much more comfortable with Maya now, and the previous week Paul had given us some great shortcuts and such to help with working in Maya such as the “K” key which allows you to scrub the animation anywhere, CINEMA 4D has the equivalent shortcut assigned to “J” but it currently doesn’t work in the new R10/11 Timeline, don’t worry I’ve posted a bug report.

Stu is a little concerned this week.

Oh and some revisions of last weeks blocking, of course this all went into doing the final walk you see up above, but also some changes to the Stu pose

Oi what a hectic week Getting ready to go to Germany on some business meant hunkering down early on my animation assignment. Fortunately I got it all done before flying out. That is until I landed in Germany got to the airport and decided to tweak a little, based on some great feedback form other AM students and mentors, which lead me me into having to upload and the Internet access at the hotel was $3 for a half hour. Yeesh.

Anyways Ballie blocking, this was the first 2 parter assignment so this was just blocking because next week we’ll refine.

And of course Stu showing some Strength, GO Stu GO!

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.