finished!

wow... that went fast... and that was stressful! especially in the end...

But everything went fine, I did the best I could I the amount of time given and am quite satisfied with the results of this semester =)

so here they come!


As you have seen, I finished "gotita." for the Animation Seminar course, what a relief... I really hope you liked i! Having a short film project is like having a never-ending submission that is poking you all the time on the same spot. But it is fun! =D I'm somehow starting to believe we are all passionate masochists… At least for the moment n_n

As promised the Production Focus of “gotita.”:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4034404/gotita_Production_Focus.pdf

I put a lot of “behind the scenes” and “making of” there, but didn’t want to put 12 pages on this blog, so for all the people interested on how it was done, or just want to see some WIP just download the *.pdf

I also did an Icon for “gotita.”, so as a present to all of you guys that followed I give you a cute little pinkish droppy Icon =)

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4034404/Icon_gotita.ico

thanks again for all the support!

Rigging for Animation was a stone in my shoe… we had around one month to do this dragon rig but of course I could not spend the entire month rigging and not do anything for “gotita.” or Character Animation. Good rigs take time! Especially for a Reel, or if one wants to focus on developing new tools for animaion. In the end I spent only 5 days doing this rig, and only 1 night of those for the skinning so bare with the crappy skin.(and crappy video that was really rushed)

*Please if you do not really know how 3D works I would strongly advise you to skip this part and continue with Character Animation, it could get too specific and boring. =P

The Rig is pretty much basic, has everything it should have, of course I didn’t do Blendshapes for the head nor corrective Shapes, didn’t really have time for them. But one thing I really put a lot of effort was on developing the, what I call, “IKHybrid”. 

From experience it is always a struggle to make the IK’s look alive as if they would be following the body movement, that’s why I preferred mostly to animate in FK. But FK can get really painful too sometimes as some movements require much more work to get done as with IK, are not as user friendly and you cannot lock it to a certain position. There is already IK/FK seamless switching, but you would still have to deal with one of them at a time. 

So what if I could mix the best of each system? Keep the user friendliness of IK while still following the bodys movement and having a seamless locking of the IK if needed? That’s when the thought of the IKHybrid came to my mind. And after a lot of though and countless attempts I finally got the script right. It ended up not being as difficult as I was expecting it. n_n One usually overcomplicates things. It is like a parenting based on offsets in which the IK is parented at the same time to as many controllers as you want, making it follow the entire body or locking on the spot seamlessly.

I really should script more, it is fun too! A good alternative after lots of animating.

I am planning on developing a tool to automate all the scripting next semester if I have time. If you are interesting in having it let me know, it could motivate me. My Character Animation and Rigging Professor already want it!

Character Animation is done as well! I had to refine (in some cases redo) each animation already done and animate a quadruped’s Walk- and Runcycle and a final Acting scene with a Human, a Ball and a Quadruped. The stressing part of it was that our professor moved the deadline two days earlier so it got pretty rushed in the end haha

It’s interesting how it developed from the old ones… I think I have learned a lot, Everything goes much faster too =)

And now Digital Painting

I never knew I would end up doing things like these n_n

The last PSD was 950MB big and original res 4500x4500 at 300DPI

I hope you enjoyed seeing the progress during this semester! It was a tough but very fruitful one. Looking forward to the next one full of new works and suprises. =D

Thank you again for following!

yours,

santy.

P.S. I will do a last post before going on holidays, with a big Christmas surprise!