Project Paycheck, day 1

So it's time for a reality check. I spent the last semester working on a short 2D segment of an animation that fell off the rails before it even left the station. I didn't even get a call/email/interview from Hawaii Animation studio regarding my demo reel. I need something impressive in my reel that reflects my style... I was on the right path with the 3D vikings... I just had the steep learning curve of modeling and rigging, so the animation suffered, then burned in hell when my computer rusted out from sea air.

So I'm starting it over... I managed to salvage some of the models, although they still crash Maya if I turn on hardware texturing. I made these new renders for my demo reel... obviously not good enough. So the first step in making this good... new model for the fish lady, hope to have a rough low poly version by the end of the day.

learning how to walk again

damn... this 3/4 walk is hard afterall! Still looks like he is moving too horizontal and not enough diagonal... and the head gets a little wonky on a couple frames... but really good design on Cherise's part, very animatable! I didn't go for too much expression, just trying to show the weight of the backpack in the steps... both in terms of actual weight and the metaphoric burden each of these guys are carrying.

Rise from the graaaaave

it lives... and so do I.... just barely. Need to hold poses longer, be less robotic... but I think this is a step in a right direction... although at this point those steps need to be leaps.

scene 13

so I started on scene 13 on Friday the 13th.... there's a lot going on in this scene as well as the very last scene... so I figured I would get them out of the way. I wanted caustics but I can't afford the mental ray rendering time... soooo I'm playing around with an area light with a procedural texture on it. Movements are still robotic, going to add in movement in the fish head to follow the fish tail... boat is going to move up and down... and avoid having too much movement in the characters that aren't currently speaking

refining the animation

So converted everything to step tangents, and started refining the movements... I want kind of slow and seductive but without looking too robotic. I'm also still tweaking the water... I want a kind of eerie color scheme so I'm experimenting with purples and reds. The water is moving too fast and choppy now though... at least I got rid of that weird clipping that was going on before though. I've also begun work on setting up the next scene with the fish under water because I really want to use caustics on that... which means mental ray and long render times... I had it set up pretty well last night, but now that file freezes at 98% when trying to open it... I might have to do it again from scratch. :(

getting my feet wet... errrr fish torso wet....

So first pass animation... just keys with no graph editor manipulation... lighting and ocean shader still need tweaking also... not animating the mouth until I have my final voice track. This screen capture is actually from my WIP second pass with a lot of adjustments... you should see the difference when watching this clip.

a weekend of frustration

After going through 2 blocks of sculpty and realizing I still need to make teeth, eyes, etc... I scrapped the fish and did a new character. Unfortunately she's not very stable and pretty fragile... I used the same holes from the fish so her legs were close together... the gun was supposed to work like a crutch... but it didn't... at this point I don't really care and I just want to start animating.