This week I finally got to animate!  I’ve also worked a lot with Anthony, assisting him with weight painting, and double checking things so we can get these body rigs done and allow Anthony to get started on the character’s faces!

Animation

Last week we got the story boards and proxy rigs finished, so we have stated animating!  On Monday Dave, Pat, and I met and divided up all the shots and we made sure we all got an even amount of action shots and acting shots.  We each have about 21 shots to work on, which is pushing it, but I’m not worried because we have a very competent team.  I’m also going to be keeping on top of all the animation to make sure everything gets done and done well!  We have set up twice a week ‘crits’ but since we are only in a rough blocking stage we arn’t going to have actually crit meetings until we have more to crit.  Right now our two day a week deadlines are primarily to keep us on track in order to get our entire short blocked out by the end of term.  I’ve also gotten 5 of my 21 shots roughly blocked in this week.

Pros: It’s cool to start seeing our animation come together.

Cons: Well, there is A LOT to animate.

Hours: 7 hours

Rig Stuff (weight painting)

On top of animating I have worked a lot with Anthony this week with our rigs.  Dave, Pat, and I had played around a lot with the proxy rigs before we started to animate, but some issues came up that we couldn’t have foreseen until we reached this point in the process.  Anthony has been doing a great job addressing all these problems this week!  I’ve also done A TON of weight painting to help Anthony keep his sanity.  We want to make sure the rigs work perfectly and I’m confident all these little issues will be resolved within the next week.

Pros: We’ve got some really nice deformations happening

Cons: Painting weights is time consuming, but necessary

Hours: 8

Upcoming Tasks:

1.) Fine tune the weight maps of our characters

2.) Block in another 3-5 shots

3). Model boots (meant to do that this week but other tasks took longer than initially projected)