3D Production Blocking + Animation

Animation

Blocking

I guess I forgot to post my blocking pass last week.

It's been quite a couple of weeks.

Sad to say that my film concept did not get the green light. But as I had said before, I am more concerned now with the work that I can produce. If anything, I feel like this is a kind of relief. Some of the pressure is off even though there's not supposed to be one director, I feel like if it was my own idea I'd feel a lot more pressure over it.

Though I do need to keep developing the idea until the end of the quarter.

Now it's just about picking which films I want to work on and hope that I get onto a good team.

As for this production project, I don't know what's happening any more. Just yesterday and today I've run into a lot of issues in trying to fix my rig.

Of course, leave it to the last couple weeks of school that things start to go wrong. I admire the people with the perfect rigs, models, and animation. I can only dream of becoming that kind of triple threat. Right now, my strengths lie in animation. I just need to practice and gain more experience in the other areas. This quarter, rigging was absolutely brand new for me so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that it's the area where I've been struggling the most in the pipeline.

I feel that this animation here is not my best though. I think that with all the issues I ran into during the rigging process (and still am), it gave me less time work on the animation. This is a big lesson in time management as well. I've succeeded in getting all the other projects completed and looking good that I have on top of this one, but I'm starting to get a feel for how long everything actually takes. I anticipated needing less time than I really did. But that's all part of the learning process. I want to say that I'm normally pretty good at managing my time and keeping on top of work, but with the newness of these things, I need to allow myself more time for messing up and figuring things out. More time than I would normally allot myself and than I would expect. So it's things like that that I think are tripping me up a bit.

There's no use in beating myself up over the shortcomings and the lumps in my rig. As I mentioned in a previous post, it always goes way better the next time I do it. But I need to keep riding this out to the end with all the lumps and bumps it has.

I really want to practice modeling more. I realize more and more how inexperienced I am with it and how useful it would be to sharpen those skills a little bit more and gain some more knowledge on it. And I should probably do the same with rigging, which as an animator is probably even more useful. For me, the rigging isn't that difficult, it's really the skinning and the weight painting that I fumble with. I think I ought to try with something really simple like binding a rig to a cylinder.

On the brighter side of things, I've really been enjoying the work I'm doing on the grad film right now. The director really liked my blocking passes, so that was a little boost of confidence. And honestly, working on these shots is probably the most enjoyable project I have right now. Probably because it's purely animating. Guess, that's an indicator for me.

Again, because it's someone else's project I don't think I can share my progress on my blog. But I will hopefully get to have it on my reel by the end of the year.

Life feels really messy and overwhelming right now. I'm struggling to keep up and I'm losing lots of sleep, but I know I'm coming out of all this with more wisdom and 3D knowledge.