Development Work

In one of my portfolio animations, I decided to utilise a new rig which was made by Gabriel Salas. The Dana rig was a rig I was excited to use for my animation. When using the rig at some point in my animation I had accidentally "broke" the rig by pressing a hot key without realising.

To rectify my mistake, I decided to explore the different ways in which I could fix the issue. I started looking on 'Youtube' for any solutions that could potentially relate to the problem I was having. Sadly I had no luck with that, so in furthering my steps to progress for my animation. I decided to look for help with one of my tutors. Through this video of showing me how to fix my issue myself, I had realised that I accidentally hid one of my the elbows locator. To fix the issue I had to search for the 'locator' in the outliner and unhide the locator.

One thing I had worked would be my workflow. Beforehand I would start all my animations in spline because I felt more comfortable in that process. However, over time I began to realise that some of the key poses were not as great and ultimately not up to the standards I would have liked them to be. When entering the editing section of my projects it was difficult to change a specific pose because I either had too many keys inbetween or one of the character's limbs were over exerted which later on became a huge issue to rectify.

After our talk with past third year 'Vitas' in November, I remember him recommending the stepped method throughout our whole animation, even during the polishing stage. I then decided to give this a try and I can definitely agree on the fact that this had been a pivoting point in my workflow. I noticed that workflow had been super effective in the way I worked on my animations. Starting my animations in stepped allowed me to focus better on my key poses, carefully and constructively. I do believe that I began to understand how to properly transition into the next key pose without weird jolty movements occurring. Another thing I realised, I was able to make a minimalist amount of changes to a key pose without dramatically effecting my animation.

This animation is called disgust. I decided I wanted to do an animation that focused more on character performance and a character's reaction to something. In this animation, my character notices someone had left there drink on the table. Without my character realising the drink was left on the table overnight and essentially did not have the most pleasant taste. In my character realising this, she then reacts in 'disgust' towards what she had drunk. This animation was to help me focus solely on emotions and facial animation without the help of an audio to guide me.

This animation was the '11 second club' competition animation. I had limited the time I had to work on this animation and spent no longer than a week on this animation due to staying on top of what I had to get done. I do believe if I extended the time I spent on the editing section, this would have been a lot more polished than what it was. As a character performance animator this competition was a perfect opportunity to work closely on the lip-syncing. ultimately, I became more self aware that I wasn't so confident with my lip-syncing and would like to improve further on this in the future.