Working with the flour sack has been fun. But inefficient in the way I go about working with the file. Here is a review of the process and some things I learnt or encounter along the along the way.

Setting up a image sequence in for a cameras image plane is pretty straight forward. At first had a slight hiccup with the images I was using started at image 400 since I deleted the earlier images since nothing was happening in the reference footage. So had to figure out how to get images working. Just a matter of setting the offset in the image plane settings.

Had some rough blocking done in File one. Upon reopening this file at a later stage my channel box was not showing Scale, translate, or rotate. So tried a new file restarted the blocking to find out that the channel box was being effected from a setting in the channel box. That I some how activated via pressing some keys on the keyboard

One the first day of working on the rig I Started with blocking some key poses of the dance which was a good start. This went downhill pretty quickly when I reopened the file and started “refining” the poses before finishing the rest of the posing stage. This created a lot of double and triple work

Starting off making silly mistakes such as not setting keys for some of the controls.

I created initially created a selection set for the shelf for the controls but missed some of the controllers so was a bit confusing at first as to why some keys were not being set

Went through a stage of deleting keys in the Graph editor to clean up the file which is well and good but should have done this at the end only instead of while still working with rig so didn't have to do this more then once.

After a bit of playing with the animation I thought the Reference video was slower then what wanted planed for character, had to rescale animation to make it more bouncy- after feed back of Nigel confirming the timing, I Started to rescale almost straight away. In retrospect I should have finished all animation before doing this-

Spent a lot of time shuffling keys around to get timing “right”

Adding the jump I spent a lot of time trying to get nice secondary, squash and stretch into the jump and landing. Made mistake of changing the timing of the animation- broke the jumping motion had a lot of keys to sift through clean up and sort out.

Working in graph editor without visual in the veiwport. Zoomed out in graph editor deleting keys that looked like not doing anything- broke some of the subtle animation movements in my hold poses and some of the minor tweaks. Looking at textured mode, realised some of poses look broken in textured mode had to tweak

Added in ground plan for shadows when adding lighting, mesh feet going below grid line a little bit, had to fix

Playing in Graph editor deleting keys created drifting keys from deleting wrong/ too many keys

In the end I spent a lot of time fixing silly mistakes from poor decisions.

Overall I am happy with the result of the animation. The Jump spin I am still not quite happy with. Some of the holds or slower isolated movements looks strange on repeat.

I can see some sliding of keys in some parts of the movement.

I would be ashamed if this Maya file had to be worked on from someone else. The keys are a mess and would not be nice to work with if someone had to go over my work o clean up further.

#chunny #chunnybaker #animation #student #sae #jdfloursack