Week 9 Week progress: Animation/problems

Since my last blog on Sunday, most of the animation has been focused on the face and hands, but as mentioned before, painting the weights, this time for the fingers has been an issue, and like before is only discovered when starting the animation. The main issue is the fingers don’t move like real fingers. This issue may have been solved if I placed a bone close to the four main fingers, however as time is short, I will cheat and either hide it or not focus on them for my camera shots.

 

Animation has been fun. I have finished (on Monday) the first animation pass, with the wiggle and panic being the last shot. From Tuesday to hopefully Sunday, the second animation pass will be focusing on facial expressions, eye movements and hand/finger expressions.

 

I have had some trouble during this pass, not so much with facial expressions (as I completed hundreds of test during the painting weights stage), but has been with the eyes. The earliest problem was the eyes weren’t staying with the body as I was moving the body around. Having tried a number of tests, I was still stuck and unsure what the problem was.

 

Having asked Wei on Tuesday what the problem was, it was relatively simple, as the joint had to position in the centre of the eye, with a control just in front, with these two having an aim constraint. My main problem originally was that I had a bone, but was on the edge as thus the eye was just rotating from that point. The main problem was I had no joint and parent/aim constraint the sphere as the eye. This seemed to work OK from the start but as more test continued, I knew it wouldn’t quite work.

 

The eye aim has been the most frustrating aspect of this week. This is courtesy of a fair bit of head movements (especially when Molly is concerned/worry and frustrated). How at times I am animating on ones, but if it helps then that is OK. However during clean up and tweaking, some of these may end up being deleted. So far on ones, the eyes are moving a fair bit more than what I would like, but then again, during clean up this should improve.