This week I've carried on working on the animation of Fishbone. I've also rectified part of the scene so as to improve the quality of the final render.
Over this week I've feel that I've made good progress with the animation, making refinements where necessary. I have now reached the halfway point of my animation, and will continue working on the motion to improve it.
I have also refined some of the detail on the main island. As I've been occasionally rendering some parts of the scenes to check the lighting, I've noticed that parts of the island look very pixelated. I knew that this wouldn't do for the final image, so I've rectified the pixel size and made adjustments where necessary.
Next week I'm heading to Stuttgart Animation Festival with a group of 9 other people, and will be there for the whole next week. I see this as an opportunity to improve my networking with professional studios, and plan to show a segment of my final major project at the festival. I will provide photos that I've taken at the festival next week.
After finishing all of Fishbone's key posing, it was time to start the animation process. My aim is to try and experiment with his motions to see what works and what doesn't work. Having already utilised animation layers the week before, I plan to use this technique for thee rest of the animation.
So far I have had varied success with the character animation, with some motions being hard to animate. As a consequence, I have sometimes tried to act out some of the motions to gain some perspective. I have also regularly checked the motions through playblasting to check the results.
Here's a video showing the progress I've mad so far. There's still some refinements I need to make but I will address them in the future.
My aim this week was to try and finish the key posing for Fishbone. As my film is 2 minutes long, I wanted to make sure that the posing was completely right before I start animating. If I had time, I would actually begin animating him as well.
Overall, I've found key posing very useful, and I plan to use this process again for future 3D animations. There are still some poses that I have to work on, but these can easily be reworked when I start animating.
I finished the key posing early enough that I could actually start animating. I haven't really done a lot yet, but it's given me an opportunity to test out new techniques. One thing I've decided to do is use a new animation layer for modifying the key poses. This will allow me to edit the keys without deleting the original key poses. I've also been editing controls using the graph editor to avoid them looking to static.
I now progress onto week 14, and will continue animating Fishbone to better quality.
