Update: Some quick mouth phonemes, blinks, dilations, sticky lips and pose deformers were created for the character before proceeding on to use the Thai Dance material as animating reference. I have been working on getting back into the mode of animating
these past three-four days. I say this because the rig used in the first batch of dance animations had some errors that made for an unnecessary charade (simply forgetting to lock and make non-keyable two translate axes! See below in the first clip of the video where the character is jittering). There are two W.I.P animations: a dance segment and a generic walk cycle. The walk cycle may be edited later; some of the movements are out-of-character. Even so, I had an epiphany. It is a good time in this technical pipeline to rehearse the cuts out with interaction animations between the two characters, by impersonating
and recording both of their movements. It will really help to understand the personas of our characters even better. Hopefully, some of the footage from our recordings will be uploaded to the blog some time next week. We can anticipate using them to drive our other animations.
Hey Dayle - so fascinating to see you work into her movements - and see her become increasingly fluid. I can see a lot of work has gone into her upper body - and there's probably lots of nuance in her fingers which can't quite be appreciated from this distance. Everything I observe now you're aware of already I'm sure, but there's something lacking in the way she pushes up from her foot when she begins to dance and then pivots - her gravity isn't quite convincing; I can't quite feel her weight here. Also, her tail feathers etc. are going to be important in terms of secondary movement - i.e. having some bounce and sway and swing when she moves - it almost feels as these elements of her would never be quite still, but instead always be just coming to rest just as she moves again - this aspect of her is going to be really important in lending further fluidity to her movements. I'm sure this is a total nightmare technically - easy for me to observe, fiendishly difficult to implement - but all that secondary movement implied by the feathers is really going to lend life and beauty to her :) Onwards, Mango Mercury, onwards!
ReplyDeleteHey, you summed up my plan. Once the animation is laid out and drafted, this should give us a bit of formation on what's going to go where in the final thing. I'm looking forward to creating the feather dynamics and nCloth afterwards, as this will promote some of the secondary movements you are talking about. Thanks for the comment and support!
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