That's what my playblast looks like just after turning it from stepped to linear keys. I remember patting myself on the back when I was blocking this for thinking, "Oooh, I've gotta be sure to put in keys on everything for this slipping and turning action at the end and be extra careful not to go through uber rotations on that bit or I'll have splining hell later on." So of course it goes and freaks out everywhere I didn't expect it to. Hahahaahahaha, oh well, not too shabby ~ at least I got these problems in the half I'd rather have them in.
Sorry I haven't posted in a bit! I've been having too much fun hanging out with college buddies in Florida :) Tra la! It was awesome. I haven't seen most of these guys in half a year and one of them in about two years. That's a huge difference when I've been used to seeing most of them around the clock for the previous four years.
*sigh*
College was so much more fun than real life. I should go back to school! If I had the funds, I wouldn't mind just collecting degrees. Hahaa, it'd be like fulfilling the undecided major's dream of majoring in everything. Whee! Ok, enough sweet tea for the day. Hmm, though now that I think about it, I suppose none of the same people would be there and that's half the experience.
Anyways, FL was awesome and the people there are so mellow. John lives in the panhandle so we all met down there for the weekend, using two former roomies' bdays as an annual excuse to force a get-together. We did all the bbq, crab trapping (or attempt thereof), go-karting, sushi-going, and touristy things we could. The highlight was taking a boat out to the Gulf for a day, parking it in a shallow area, and just running around in the bay. Unfortunately for me, I now apparently have to admit that I've somehow developed a massive allergy to the sun (GARH!!! OF ALL THINGS TO RANDOMLY MANIFEST?!?!) that's been slowly creeping up on me this whole summer. So erh yea, five minutes out there even under a hat and SPF50 and I'm a griping ball of itchy toast for a week...ewww.... But anyways, it was simply great to see old friends and meet new ones. It feels so different now that we all have to make a concerted effort to visit each other. Hmmm, I'm suddenly jealous of people who didn't go to school in the middle of nowhere and hence have a higher chance of sticking around the same general area near all their old friends. Anyways, thanks John for an awesome vacation!!
Oh, and here's the extended blocking I turned in last Sunday. Sorry, I was too preoccupied frolicking in the ocean or something to post this earlier. Wow, I really need to stop drinking sweet tea on days that I have to get up earlier than usual. It just gives me weird verbiage.
Last week we had a short but informative lecture from Rick O'Connor on the dynamics of weight. Then, remaining in stepped mode, we went ahead and added more breakdowns to our push animations from the week before to determine all the ease ins and ease outs we'd like to control. I found this particularly tough since my personal mantra from the previous assignments was to set as few keys as possible such that going from blocking to splining would be simpler. My initial reaction to last week's assignment was that it nullified this workflow I had been living by and left me at a complete loss of understanding for quite a bit. But after finally resisting the urge to go ahead and spline things, but rather force myself to add more breakdowns, I do have to admit that I see the point of blocking more tightly to make conscious choices of intermediate poses rather than leaving it to the computer. Hmmm, though I think I still like my prior workflow better. It's inarguable that it's nice to see how your animation is flowing outside of blocked mode. More importantly, switching to splines always introduces so many things that I inevitably end up deleting keys and moving things around. In that process, I have to focus on all of those ease-in/out poses anyways. Having blocked more tightly for this last assignment, I feel like I'll still have to alter nearly all the keys I added last week once I go to splines. But then again, this probably just indicates that I still don't understand the process all that well. Boo.
Another side-effect of going out of town this week was that I didn't find the time (not to mention computing power) to work on stuff as much as I wanted to. Well ok so that's just a silly complaint. The bigger problem was that I just had sheer animator's block or something. I tried changing that accidental smash with the head into a conscious push with the head since everyone's reading it that way anyways (and apparently I can't get good video reference of myself smashing my head into the wall full force since I flinch a lot), but that part is still off! I must've thumbnailed and reblocked that bit from scratch seven times and I just can't get it right. On an up note, the other students over at AnimationMentor.com have been incredible with critiques and suggestions on the rest of the clip. Jazz and a few others mentioned adding more hip and spline rotations so it's not so limited to one axis. I didn't even realize I was doing that! That was definitely was one of those lightbulb moments :) Thanks guys! The community there is just awesome and contributes vastly to what makes the place so great. Yea, I know I say that a lot (at least on the forums over there), but I just get reminded of it all the time. So I'm looking forward to adding in more stuff this week rather than feeling stuck trying to figure out what I need. Lala ~
Ok, back to work. It's a short week and I'm taking off for CA on Saturday! Yay!!!!! First Siggraph and I get to meet a bunch of cool people!
Happy bday to my little Scion tC! Well, happy one-year-since-I-got-it day anyways! I remember putting off getting a car as long as I possibly could since yikes they eat so much. It finally became necessary when I moved to the boonies and I'm so glad the tC came out right then. I never even knew I needed a sunroof till it showed me so. :)
Dang, I almost didn't make it this week ~ I just can't get the action in hitting the obstacle to read properly ~ *sigh*. If you've got any suggestions, I'd love to hear them!
On the plus side, I'm really loving the fact that our assignments this semester have been structured around iterations. This way, we get three or four weeks worth of time and critiques to polish something as opposed to just two and you get enough in-between time to step away and look at it fresh :)
In other news, I've finally decided to part with enough cash to check out Siggraph this year (oh my poor poor bank account). So yay!!! REALLY excited about that, especially since it'll be my first time there.
Driving to work in the morning is an adventure, not simply because the entire drive is on a one-lane country road; or because everyone in the city needs that one lane to get where everyone in the city works; or because construction for three separate shopping plazas, one new neighborhood development, and on the road itself are permanent fixtures; or because all the beavers and deer are freaking out and unfortunately getting run over; or because people just drive slow. I think it's mostly because stuff just somehow happens.
In today's adventure, I unfortunately but happily overslept. So then there I was happily speeding (shhh) around a bend in the country road five minutes later when suddenly there was a huge SUV with a box its own size attached to its roof by a single bunngee cord right in front of me. Hmmm, that's no good, I figure. But I'm not quite awake yet and thinking time is a bit slow (though apparently reaction time is still good, no worries) so right as I'm deciding I should probably slam on the brakes and give him some space, the bungee cord snaps free and somehow manages to launch -- not drop, but launch -- this huge SUV-sized box right at me.
GOOD MORNING! *SWERVE*
Who says Nintendo games aren't good for you?! Only thanks to years of virtual practice could I have managed to miss that huge thing without straying far out of the one lane while half asleep. Whewww, I'm also glad my car is short and handles well; otherwise I'd have a horrible legitimate excuse for being late today if I made it at all. Hmmm, all in all, today's adventure was a good one: no damage sustained by anyone except the box and it's bungee guardian, got to sleep in, and made it to work in less time than usual since the one slow car I encountered had to pull over.
The South is...weird. A little before noon today, the clouds suddenly gathered and just mass-dumped themselves for a couple minutes. I decided to grab some lunch and was watching this go on through the windows as I walked down the hall. Fortunately, at the exact moment I got to the door, this proceeding decided to cut itself off, just as suddenly as it started. It was magical ~ burning hot, dark and cold, then burning hot again ~ no transitions!
So then I stepped outside into a flooded parking lot and realized, hey, why am I not wearing heels or waterproof shoes? Hahaha, the South has rendered away all the good weather-precautionary actions I subconsciouly stuck to in my Ithaca days.
Then comes the even more magical part. As I trek through the first three parking rows to get to my car while this huge, flat stream rushes towards the sewers (the underground was singing!!!), I notice that it's so freaking hot out that I'm watching the water vaporize! No wonder there aren't any little streams near here. It was kind of a surreal effect, like wading through a forest of dry ice except the trees are SUVs and it's blindingly sunny.
It's a couple hours later now and the waterpark outside was long since dried before I even made it down the road to my lunch destination, but my pants are only getting stickier as the wetness keeps climbing my khakis in this dank programming cave.
I got to work today and there was an 8-inch floppy sitting proudly in its sleeve up against my monitor. Whoa, I haven't seen one of these thing since I was, I dunno, seven!!! A whole whopping 256 KB capacity. The best part was reading the caution icons and cheesily-selected words that went along with them. One showed a bent floppy with the word "NO" in a couple romance languages and then the equivalent of "CAUTION" in Japanese alongside. Another showed a magnet next to a floppy with little thunder zaps coming out of it, accompanied by the word "NEVER" in a couple romance translations and then the equivalent of "EXTRA CAUTION" in Japanese. Though hey, now I'm wondering if those romance translations were accurate. Hahahaha, I guess that's back when jobs for graphics didn't exist in the techie realm. Hey, wait, could this floppy be older than me?! Wow....
So back on the graphics note, here's my assignment for last week. There were some outrageous monstrosities going on with the arms for awhile, but hopefully I've managed to hide most of them. Also, I had to piece together two files since one of them got corrupted halfway through, so errh, enjoy finding the blip.
We also started planning out our assignment for the next few weeks, which is to animate pushing a heavy object up an incline. I jotted down some poses and possible actions, then tried taking some reference videos. Though I don't have an incline handy, my landlady does have a couch, a large living room, and a book on which I can prop half of my camera to make a virtual incline (well, with the walls still 90 degrees to the incline) so I spent some time shoving it across the room (shh, don't tell them) and trying to capture a fall in the process. Dang, apparently all that snowboarding spillage I used to take has only taught me how not to catch myself falling. Ouch. Obviously, I only managed a couple takes of that before I realized hardwood is really hard.
Oooh, this would be a good time to mention something Mark said about reference videos: they should be informational, not inspirational. Plannning is about figuring out the soul of a shot. And the heart for doing that has to come from the artist. Reference videos can be used for teeny supporting inspirations here and there, like a particular flick of the hand or something visually appealing which you wouldn't think of till you observed it. BUT, reference videos should be meant as a basis for exploring the physical details about what you want to put into an animation, not as a point of finding the soul of a shot.
Ok, enough little thoughts from me, time to go figure out the roots of what appears to be a massive allergic reaction. Benadryl knocked me out six hours before my usual sleepy time yesterday. And then I was out for twelve hours! They should sell that stuff as sleeping pills. Garrh what is this from...sunscreen? Cat? Work?
Dang, converting a blocked shot to splines is hard. Nothing fits, everything's possesed by weird twitchiness, and I'm losing any semblance of decent timing that I had in blocked mode. I'm so tempted to just scrap it all and animate starting with splines again (bad Irene, must get the hang of this!).
Well at least it's completely normal that this part takes so long. This week, we had a guest lecture with Rick O'Connor (ILM) on the process of creating a whole shot, from reference and planning to final tweaking. It was one of those superbly informative walkthroughs that answer or confirm all the things you've been trying to figure out over weeks (and absolutely hilarious presentation). Just for an idea on how long the various parts of the process took relative to each other, first-pass blocking took Rick about an hour whereas polishing took four hours (of course, multiply those numbers by a bajillion and that's how long it takes me).
So in yesterday's Q&A, Mark suggested a couple methods of going from stepped keys to splines. One method, which is especially popular among Ringling folks, is to convert everything in a ten-frame window at once, perfectly polish all those keys, then go onto the next ten frames. Mark's typical workflow is to hide all geometry except for the pieces directly on the main line of action (e.g. hips through shoulders), polish that, then layer on the extremities one at a time. Meanwhile, he'll often go back and forth between all the pieces he'd already work on and make adjustments as appropriate.
Mark also noted that it's standard to delete keys to get a nice arc, especially since there are often too many added for the sake of blocking. Doing so to smooth things out is particularly imperative in 3D work since 3D is much less visually accepting of jitters. Even keying on ones still leaves minute hitches. These variations are great for adding life in 2D work as well as infusing the artist's hand into the shot, but is often just 'too much life' for 3D.
So those are the pieces of advice I've been going back to over and over again this week whenever my animation gets too messy and needs simplification. Ok, yay disorganized, rambly post. I'm sleepy and here are the sushi people....
Yes, that's a non sequitur, but lack of sleep brings weird things to light (like the words 'non sequitur'). I wanted to try out this new image uploading thing on blogger and hey look what I found deep in the recesses of my hard drive. And yes, that's a kids' sing-along TV show with people dressed as various sushi and sashimi.
Wheew, finished before the deadline! Yikes, coming home this week cut things a bit short.
My major crit from Mark last week was that my side view (which I intelligently didn't show here, mwahaha) looked like a completely different walk from the front view of the same animation. Basically, my side view looked a lot floppier. Mark described it as someone trying to catch herself from falling and suggested that I forget the forced overlap I had worked in and make the walk more poised, practiced, and certain. Before I turned stuff in last week, I already knew that the side view didn't work (and actually had already redone it twice), but I couldn't figure out why. So I ended up uploading it to Mark anyways and thankfully he spelled it out for me.
So this week, I made those revisions, then worked in the rest of the assignment. Everything's still in blocked mode, but this week our goal was to add arms to our existing walk and also to extend the beginning of the piece. The directions here were to work in a new bit of anticipation and start the character off from a stopped position.
So here 'tis! Erhhh, once again, my side view looks like crap ~ though just for the turn this time ~ so I've decided not to waste bandwidth on it. Hmmm, I still decided to upload it to Mark anyways so he can keep lowering my grade :) But hey, it's all for the learning.
