Well I’m already done the first class, and I seriously can’t believe 3 months has already flown by, two jobs and school sure helps me pass the time. No real assignment this week other than combining all my assignments into one reel, so here it is:

Tomorrow we find out who our new mentor and classmates are, its kind of cool that every three months we get new classmates and mentors. It really helps to build a community and friends and contacts. A big thank you however to Paul Allen for being such a fantastic mentor with great notes and advice. I’ll definitely make sure to pester him for another critique here and there down the road.

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.

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.

Week 3 and a second assignment done. Planning was the key goal in doing this assignment.

For Stu, the Pose was to be excited, and my main goal was to avoid the stereo typical jump in the air with arms out, but that turned out to be much much harder than I planned. A lot of what shows excitement is either the release of energy or the holding back of a lot of energy, but without facial controls or the ability to raise the shoulders, I found most of my poses simply didn’t convey what they were intended to so I had to scrap most of them. I crunched Sunday morning, to do some more obvious excitement poses like this one.

But I ended up going back to one of my first ones because I felt it did still convey excitement, while also telling a bit of a story, which I think was something I liked about last weeks pose. I think form now on my goal will to be not just to meet the pose but really try to tell a story with each.