story edit

Changes

So there was a tutorial in which many changes were suggested essentially turning the film inside out and whilst making it work better there are a lot of red crosses and changes on this and a lot of new shots to workout. very daunting. but i have pretty much completed my dissertation hence a lack of posting and general animation updates.

 

Moon stuff

Finished the massive to do list of fixes to the rig, the shoulders still dont deform as nice as id like but Ive started blocking in a sequence this morning, landing and looking around - cut to shiny thing in distance - back at him staring it out... got sucked into it so ended up doing it all in one sequence for now.
This is properly rough and will be updated as there is progress worthy of playblasting...
first up is going back and doing the arms and defining the path of the shuffle, somehow managed to overlook that entirely and the camera will not move like this it just does for now as it was a test not intending to be posted... but has been anyway

Playing with the camera, way happier with something along these lines (this is with spline tangents and a few more inbetweens, loads of anim to layer in and tweak yet):

Moon blocking and bug fixing

Ive pretty much blocked all of the stuff that happens in his bedroom and some shots have had a really quick 1st pass on the animation - props moving and playing with overlaps so with that going well i decided to start blocking in the moon sequences. However in switching to the other rig/character mesh its back to bug fixing controllers that werent properly assigned and other things that had gotten messy with me trying to retrofit the rig i'd made for the other character mesh. this probably means a day of tweaking settings and weights. yay. so for now the to do list is as follows:

- establish why wrists dont work in fK
- wrist fK manipulator doesnt follow as expected
- Finger curl controls work for middle and end knuckles but not top one
- shoulder collapses in on itself
- correct influence on hands and suit details to prevent clipping

blocking continued

more blocking, horrible floaty arm, been staring at this all day and generally disliking.

Starting to get the shoulders deforming okay tho

*small update -- thursdays progress*

more blockout

Having spent the last few days blocking things out and cutting video reference/refilming and generally doing anything but animating ive blocked in a few more things, just the main keys for now so i can settle on the timing then i'll go back and play with overlapping/offsets and look at the f-curves...

its the section where he's starting to build his rocket and hang stars on the ceiling etc, im still testing various things with the string set up for now (i.e dynamics) so the prop doesnt move, was more focussed on getting the body animation timing correct - there is no facial animation yet either. decided to work in layers body/face/props/cameras rather than try and get everything done at once so i guess all of this is subject to change and testing.

Timing

Having started animating its become apparent im more than a little rusty with regards to hand keying and even weirder is swapping from animating at 30fps to 25... wasnt expecting that to feel odd. So in the hope it helps ive decided to film lots of video reference which is something i got used to doing last year, and to try help things i made a box helmet because inside i am still the 8 year old with a cardboard box rocket.
Also worth mentioning was the talk we had with Tim Allen on monday and him speaking about over animating and trying to put too much in and over doing it, which i think ive been doing in my head and complicating what should be a simple motion. Eitherways sections have been re storyboarded and thumbnailed so i've got a good idea what im after and something always crops up in the live action reference too. So here goes...

Problems...

Started animating with props today and found a bug in the process, for some reason when i attached the pencil to the hand joint he got super stretchy arms, trying to figure out the problem as fast as I can in the hope that i can attempt to save some of the animation done before I found the break....

Stuff

Finally been caught out with the whole working between home and uni across various hard drives and usbs. A corrupt file has made me drastically reassess how im working. Ive claimed a pc at uni and have a dedicated place for my project and will work here on all important stuff from now on which means taking advantage of late nights/early mornings/weekend access which will hopefully save any more lost files. Im in the process of working up the sniff shot from the previous post as this was the file that was lost... 

Blockout continued and the sort of development of a shot

Slowly starting to block more stuff out. Progress is slow but the distractions of recent weeks are gone and early starts/weekends in the studio have returned. Planning to start with the easier shots and work my way up to some of the more complex ones

Adding more inbetweens and correcting stuff, the blendshapes need a fair bit of remodelling/scuplting to get a decent sniff going.

Small update in the blockout, ive accidently moved the camera but kind of like it, so for now it stays and i'll see how it feels in comparision to the surrounding shots in the animatic. added the dropping hand, feels too quick so i'll sort out the timing and add an updated version shortly. Also the head looks like its hitting an invisible wall. not intended.

Gotta fix the left wrist so its not robotic, then another pass all over to avoid anything feeling robotic etc. Also get some of the motions overlapping as there a bit clunky currently 

Unsure if the left arm really needs to move and whether its actually the pose of the hand thats not right, eitherways theres definately something wrong 

Star Test pt2

Been re thinking about how the stars on string will move and after talking to a couple of people ive given dynamics a go (with the help of charlie)
The meshes have been combined and turned into n-cloths, then the top vertices were selected > nConstrain > transform, which gives me the ability to move the string.
Next up is attaching this to the boy's hand...