For this week I was able to stay on track and complete at least one animation. I was originally planning on doing a jump for this week but changed my mind last minute and decided to do a stomp instead. I of course had to use the Ugg rig for this because he just works perfectly for it. I had done a stomp game animation a while back in CAGD 340 that I was pretty happy with so I actually used that for reference and recreated it. Because of this I didn't run into any complications.
For next week I would really like to get into some more interesting rigs and create a little bit more exciting animations. I have a cyborg rig that I have been dying to use by Truong CG artist so I'm thinking of doing a set of animations with it, I'm just not entirely sure of what those animations will be yet. I haven't thrown the rig into maya yet so I am hoping that it works well despite my poor planning.
Last week I stated that my plan for the semester was to create 2 animations each week. After attempting to accomplish that, I realized how unrealistic that goal is for me. On top of work, CAGD 441, CAGD 445, and CAGD 325, I just don't have a lot of free time to throw even more animation onto my plate when that's basically all I am doing every day already. So I have decided to cut my goal down to one animation per week.
So far I have completed a very simple idle animation along with a kick animation. Neither of these animations are very refined and I just threw them together with the simple Jack rig to really work on the basics. I actually did the kick animation about 3 different times just trying to get one done that I was somewhat happy with. My problem was that I kept over complicating the animation from the beginning and then just getting lost in key frames. So I decided to just finally do a simple forward kick and started with a starting pose then went and posed the kick and just filled in from there.
Next week I would like to work on either a jump or a simple run cycle, and then hopefully I can move on to more complex and fun stuff later on.
This last week I have mainly focused on scheduling and organizing exactly what I will be doing and when. I wanted to really have everything figured out down to what rig I will be using, so that I can get to work and not get confused in the future. It is important to me to make the most of the time that I have this semester mainly because it is so limited. But if I set specific goals for every week, hopefully it will keep me focused and productive.
For this next week I am going to try to have finished a simple punch animation as well as a simple kick. For these animations I am going to use the rigs from the Body Mechanics Rigs Mega Pack, and then for the more complex animations I will dive into more advanced rigs.
After next week I will be working on Resting animations as well as a dodge. I'm hopefully going to follow this trend of doing two animations a week so that by the end of the semester I will have a huge library of animations to add to my portfolio and my skills will have hopefully improved as well. I also want to work on more specialized actions that are based off of different rigs that I use.
This semester I am mainly interested in Game Animation. I have been back and forth between wanting to do cinematic animation versus game animation. Originally I had wanted to do a fight scene for my senior project, so that maybe I could get a little bit of both concepts. Doing a cinematic fight scene could possibly give me some practice in different poses that could be used for faster game animations later. But ultimately I have decided to just really crack down on game animation and focus on getting comfortable with simple short animations to add to my portfolio.
I plan on doing a variety of moves with a variety of rigs to really expand my horizons and get more comfortable with maya. As an end goal I want to try to have at least 10 animations that I am happy with and will feel good about having in a portfolio. Some of the types of moves I want to animate would be kicks, jumps, punches, resting states, and flips. I also really want to focus on repetition to hammer in the fundamentals of each animation, so I plan on doing multiple of each action to build my memory in how to accomplish each one. Once I have all of the simple stuff down, I will start to venture out into more complex moves.
