Animania!

HOLY FREAKING CRAP I LOVE MAYA!!! Lets see it’s now at about 34 hours over the weekend getting Scene 1 completed and I have all the animation done, but still have some tweaking in the graph editor to do and I must say I am very happy with what I have done and impressed as hell yet again at the power of Maya and this freaking class. After getting all the other animation completed I moved on the to the last thing: the dreaded antennas. Well after about a half hour of struggling to get them to almost look a little rubbery and failing miserable I could see that it was going to take hours to get them right…

I sat back and decided to think, there must be an easier way to do this, I mean there is this soft body dynamics system and all. Well I decided to give it a shot and started turning the curve of the spline IK on each antenna into a soft body with the copy as a goal. This meant deleting the clusters and locators I had and recreated the IK with 4 spans this time. I set the goal weight very high at 75 to 100 and started playing it. BAM! Almost got it on the first shot. Adjusted conserve to .85 and it was exactly what I was looking for. Damn I love Maya.

Really I am brain dead at this point and am so sick of hearing the song I picked for the first scene I never want to hear it again. Thank god I am almost done with it. :) Really it is nothing new for me to work so much on a project, it is just when animating I don’t really get to put on any music because I am listening to the sound in Maya to make sure it all syncs up. Makes for a really mind numbing day… In all I am reaching the 200 hour mark on this project, but sitting back and watching it is well worth it, especially knowing that I am able to apply what I am learning to all kind of situations.

Anyway I haven’t done any lessons learned in a while so though it was about time for one.

Lessons learned:

A good rig is probably one of the most important things in character animation. It was so much easier to animate my little guy once I added the more advanced spine system from an earlier post. And only having a cluster system in place for the tentacles because I could find nothing that gave me that level of control really drove this point home this weekend. I really see why professional animators say that they get about 4 seconds of animation a week done; character animation is hard and very tedious. Add to that a control rig that is not very intuitive and you will drive yourself insane. Jeez, I shutter to think about all the extra work that went into animating Toy Story as compared to today’s animators; really makes me respect them a hell of a lot more.