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.

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.