Animation 01
As usual when we hit the animation leg of any of our projects, things seem to slow to a crawl and or go awry. Not to break tradition, it’s been over a month since I updated this Journal due to animation slowdown. Or main TD is KO’d while moving house and Tal has stepped in to supply some animation work. Tal is using Blender so it took a bit of trouble shooting to get used to each others workflow, and hammer another new app into the transfers pipe. MDD is working in both LW and Modo so we should be good to go from here on in.
sd
*Rigged and animated in blender 2.49Tranferring to Lightwave and Modo via MDD
TAL said:
Im almost done with the posing, unless u think i should change something.
Im not sure about the last poses before he starts to walk. it gives him some character, but also makes it a bit more cartoony then realistic.
I still need to work on the timing (things, like the walk will probably be slowed down so the video might be a bit longer).
still gonna add much more breakdowns and much more elements will move and overlap, i wanted your opinions first for the posing and the current timing.
unfortunately I used IK through the whole animation of the legs. That’s why i have a lot of problems with the “aiming gun” hand/leg (it looks a bit like stop motion right now). i should have switched to FK when the Hand/Leg is off the ground and use the ik only for the walking part. i need to find a way to copy the animation into the fk mode or just use the ik and add much more keyframes.
So far I have no complaints…I like what you are doing…was a bit worried when I saw the legs hanging out of the sockets on the pipeline test animations you sent last week, but I figured you would fix that and you did.
Technically the legs are metal and should not deform, but hey…it looks good anyways so go for it.
If you haven’t checked it already, I’d apply some smoothing to make sure you’re animating with proper parts alignment, cause the mesh base rez will not give a 100% accurate visual…Also maybe slap on a UV grid to check the texture distortion if you do some more severe deforming poses.
Overall I gotta say I am impressed not only with what you have animated so far, but that you stuck with it when the transfers didn’t work on the first or second try!
Not to take away your thunder …. However, to facilitate the project getting more material out, I’m wondering if you would be open to (eventually) making your rig available to qualified people on the Blender forum…maybe we can speed things up a bit and get more animators on this now that we have a working setup? Not that you are slow….it’s just a lot of work for one guy….
Infact, it would be nice to get a bit of an animation team started…You could care for animation TD if you are into it and add some more experience to your resume?
I am definitely bookmarking this page and sharing it with my friends.