I’m grateful to have a mentor who’s is very prompt about getting our E-critiques done quickly, and offers not only a lot of comments about what is currently there, but direction about where you can take it. Mike liked the poop but took the idea a totally different direction where instead of just having the feeling something is there and being startled by it Stewie would smell something and then look around and when he see what it is, and scurry to get away.

So Monday night I had a choice to make either I take it this new direction drastically changing what I had and meaning a whole lot of new work or I keep polishing what I have. So I pulled an a late night till 4 AM reblocking the first half of the animation and boy am I glad I did. After our Awesome Q&A where mike did a walkthrough of how he animates, he took a quick look and offered me a little more guidance and This is what I got:

Now the concerning thing is that by this point in the assignment we should be at a semi finished state and the last week is supposed to be polishing, that final 10%, but for me it will be a lot more work, I’m way behind but I think the assignment will be much better for it.

Another week done, payments in for the next term it is hard to believe that I’m almost through the first third already. This assignment has been a tough one, first if you look at last weeks I had the legs all wrong int he sitting pose they have to be the other way around for it to work, and as I got into adding more poses and then into the starts of splining things I had to pretty much go frame by frame to make sure the legs never intersect or criss-cross and make sure the knees follow nice arcs. I spent way to much time on those damn knees that I kind of wish I was animating a Stewie no knees instead of a Stewie no arms.

I cut out a lot based on feedback and critique, the breathing at the end, the over blinking and especially the over exaggerated double take. I think everything feels tighter now. The other thing I really learned through all my feedback is a question I’d asked Mike regarding needing more poses between the steps as he moves back. To me it was clear that each pose in last weeks assignment were the poses where his feet were planted I wasn’t doing any pose where feet were in transition, but no one saw it that way Mike even commented that it still looked like the back foot was in passing rather than being planted. So yes clearly needed more poses in my blocking last week.

Oh and if you are wondering where Tailor went, i got lazy and didn’t want to animate him so I’ve replaced him with the pile of poop from my last assignment in Class 1. Might make an interesting trend of always appearing in final assignments for each class, I don’t know. Honestly though I may put him back in if I have time, I do have his his entrance blocked but nothing on the tail, and I just don’t know if I’ll want to put time into that tail when Stewie is the focus. I think it still works as it is now, I mean who wants to meditate next to that?

New Assignment and I feel good about this one. Stewie is meditating and then gets realizes he has a neighbor, good ol Tailor who startles him and scrambles to back away. the assignment I chose was to get up from sitting on the ground with the Stewie that has no arms (there fore no arms to assist in getting up making it more difficult.)

Planning for this was fun, a few near misses with my fireplace mantle but a lot of great off balance poses that I stumbles and managed to correct myself. Made for some great posing that I did over and over and over again with Stewie.

I’m now making heavy use of both the TweenKey and Anim Curve 3D plugins provided to AM students. The anim curve is like a much cooler version of the basic animation curves in C4D. Both have advantages and disadvantages. The main one in animcurve is that it often can corrupt the animation interpolation and if not caught before scrubbing, can freeze Maya. It is BETA after all.

I like that it can color the curves and show them all the time, and that when modifying keys along the 3D curve in the editor you have the actual axis gizmo to move along X Y and Z with more control. That said they are really slow and can often get in the way. Still I’d love to see MAXON developers take some time for once to enhance this feature which they’ve had for about a decade now with little or no change. (Bad as that may sound most apps don’t have such a feature built in at all really, including Maya)

Tween key is a handy little plugin for recording poses inbetween two other key poses, its pretty basic and simple I’d much rather be using tradigitools, but I will have to wait for them to get it working with Maya 2009. Basically these plugins let you record a pose at a specified fraction between the nearest two key poses. This offers a much more traditional type workflow like using drawings and favoring one key or the other. I love this workflow.

I made sure this week to actually put time in each day on my assignment and yet I still ended up staying up extremely late on Saturday (well technically Sunday morning) finishing. Overall I’m quite pleased with this one, there’s some great things and some really really bad things. Overall the timing isn’t where I’d like it but to do the things I’d want I’d need another 50 frames to get more time for the reactions and such. As well Mike recommended I have him bounce around or hobble a bit when he’s on one leg but I just didn’t have the time to modify that sections since it was already working reasonably well.

Anyways new assignment is similar to the last although some choices allow for us to use a Stewie with Arms. I’ve still opted to continue without arms on this one and bring back Tailor as an instigator to the action. Let’s see if I can actually have some blocking done by Tuesday this time.

Busy week as usual, but I made sure to take some awesome advice from my mentor Mike Walling regarding inspiration. Back in high school and at VFS i had this trusty little 13 inch TV VCR combo hooked up to my PC that I would watch DVD’s and video on all the time. I don’t know what happened, well maybe its because I gave my sister that TV, but I sort of lost this concept. It wasn’t a distraction but more a constant inspiration anytime I looked away from what I was working on, Bam there was some cool animation on that would keep me going.

I also think it helped a bit with my common procrastinating by giving me a few seconds of something else to break up the grind without getting up and leaving to watch TV. So I ripped the old 27 inch TV from our Bedroom and moved the printer scanner to the side so that I now have a TV with video constantly while working, and I love it.

Now to the cons. First I’m still rehabilitating my back from NAB , so I have to get up and walk around often anyways, constant pressure on my lower back won’t help things. So the idea of the monitor keeping me from leaving the computer isn’t really working yet.

The other con is a big one though. After a recent DVD and BluRay rental at the local blockbuster a few weeks ago I looked at the price and knew that there are much cheaper alternatives like on demand., but Time Warner On Demand hasn’t really worked well for us. so I asked Rick at work about his Netflix account and how he liked it, and he not only recommended it but gave me a coupon for a longer free trial that they received for friends and family. Well I’m hooked already, haven’t even received the first disc but I’m catching up on heroes since I haven’t seen an episode since early season 2. So being inspiration and not a distraction hasn’t really worked out I wasted most of Friday night watching TV instead of working. Bahh what a stupid awesome invention. Damn you Netflix, Damn you.

Anyways here is the refined blocking so far, didn’t finish the end walk at all, but this is also a little different then what I handed in. I cut it down to the last five minutes on this one, too close. Sadly though I didn’t notice that a last minute tweak caused a major pop in my animation, it was a really stupid mistake, but there was not time to re-render and upload again, so I just added a note for Mike on my incompetence. Anyways I figured I’d fix that one issue before posting here. Anyways Enjoy.