Monday, April 10, 2006

Update

Well as promised I am now ready for a more indepth update.

Since the beginning of the semester, or more precisely since the hand in of the proposal, I have developsed a narrative for blink which has a bit more life. This has involved a lot of work

I've had two characters to rig.

Blink proved to be a real problem because I couldn't work out how I was gong to animate his mouth. The reason being that I wanted the mouth to be a simple shape that deforemd across the surface and not a mouth that uses morph targets as we see on most 3d characters. I then discovered Maya 7 with which I discovered that you can paint straight onto any objects surface.
It then became apparent that if I painted a mouth I could use the paint brush attributes to tweak the shape of the mouth. So using an example setup of a character that comes with Maya 7, I managed to create a pretty felxible mouth control for blink. If I can get my website working I should be able to put a link to some animation tests I 've done with Blink, untill then you'll have to make do with the static images that are here.

In additon to Blink I have also been juggling my time modelliing a more standard 3d character which has been a complete arse to setup!

However only today have a finished rigging him, it's taken almost 3 weeks, from modelling to rigging but I finally have a set up that is pretty flexible and should allow for all the animation I need. Although I do still need to go and setup some facial expressions for him, but that'll be a days work and have that sceduled for later this week

In addition to all the technical stuff, I also took some time out to constracut a plan chart which is simmilar to a dope sheet. When I do eventually sit down to start animating, the plan chart will be prestty useuful in that it charts the length of all my shots (in frames), including the length of any cuts between shots. Having done the plan chart already, I alreaddy have a clear breakdown of all the key elements of each shot such as the basic aim of each shot or what key poses I need to express with each shot.

Anyhow that's enuff rambling, I now need to go and build some sets!

Woohoo!

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