Aim of the day 19th May

• Finish animating final scene - √
• Watch last TWO episodes of 24 season 7!!!!- √

UPDATES

Aim of the day 18th May

• Animate scene 9 shot 2 for at least one character - √

Aim of the day 15th May

• Twist links for Lee and Kitty - √
• Final scene (9?) shot 1 - √
• Bench press a whale - X

UPDATESSS


Kitty and Lee twist links




Scene 9

My idea for this shot was to have cho trying to get out of the cart before its stopped. Here is my initial attempt:


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Not overly happy with this...

Aim of the day 14th May

• Scene 7 shot 7 - √
• Scene 7 shot 15 - √
• Facial animation for the caves - X (I have decided to work on this once the characters a final and ready to go into the scenes)
  
• Fix Cho's rig/skinning - √

GO!

UPDATES

Scene 7 stuff



Ive changed shot 6 to a different angle so that the reverse shot that followed is no longer necessary cutting 2 seconds off the scene! I also rolled the camera a bit on the first close up of Lee reaching the boot to make it look like her arm is coming from the side more rather than the top.


Fixing Cho

As you can see in the picture below Cho's shoulders are crap. This is my fault for putting the joints in the wrong place when i rigged the proxy models.




As I had already skinned Cho there didn't seem to be an easy way to fix the problem, especially seeing as Ive done loads of animation with the rig so couldn't just redo the whole thing or it would mess it all up!

I exported the skin weights for her whole body and then detached her skin and deleted all the rig controllers leaving just the joints. I then repositioned the shoulder joints to the proper places:



I then used the same mel script I used to begin with to make the rig controllers again making sure that they were all named the same as the original controllers. Seeing as we are using references for most of our objects, including characters, it meant that i could just replace the old reference file with this new one and it all updated with the animation in tact!


All the characters have had wrist problems due to my plans for twist links not working out. Originally i thought that the rig script i used supported them. It does but the joints twist the wrong way... So i got rid of the twist joints in favour of corrective blend shapes. These worked ok but went a bit mental when doing anything other than rotating in x axis. Today I had a brainwave and thought that I would probably be able to add in the twist links but use influence geometry instead meaning that I wouldn't have to go back and add joints to the rig.

1. I asked Dan, Anna and Jake each to model their characters with the palms facing down and with a twist in the forearm
2. I created three cubes to act as the twist links that the arm would be skinned to
3. I wrote an expression which tells the fist link to rotate on the x-axis 75% of however much the wrist rotates by on its x-axis. I wrote similar expressions for the 2nd and 3rd links but made them rotate by 50% and 25% respectively
4. This image shows the rotation of each link when the wrist is rotated 90 degrees
5. This image shows how the links effect the mesh and how the twist tapers off towards the elbow.

Aim of the day 13th May

• Set up Kitty's face rig - √
• playblast out first scene - √
• scene 7 shots 5 and 6 - √
• Fix problems metionetioned yesterday - √

UPDATES

Kitty's face rig. Unlike the other characters I moved the rig over to the side so i can actually see the face when animating it! Go common sense!

Aim of the day 12th May

• Scene 7 - shot 2 both characters - √
• Scene 7 - shot3 both characters - √
• Finish rig and skin Kitty - √
• Watch 24 - √
  
• Eat chineese food - √

UPDATES

24 is awesome:


Chinese food is good.


Kitty is skinned and ready to rock. Im sure there will be problems with it as im going through the animation but for now this works. As with all the characters the skirt will be animated with dynamics after the main animation is complete.




Ive just noticed some dead spots on some of the body parts. Ill makes sure thats fixed tomorrow.

Comp breakdown

Aim of the day complete!

Lee is bored of the ride by this point whereas cho is giving up hope.

Aim of the day 11th May edition

• Scene 07 - shot 01 - both characters animated
• Scene 07 - shot 01 - both characters facial animation
  

blend shapes

This shows the controls I have set up on the face to drive the blendshapes I made below:


In addition to the shapes shown above I also have a narrow and wide shape for the mouth and later added left and right movement as demonstrated by cho:

The eyebrows and the eyelashes are separate meshes that are skin wrapped to the face so that they follow the brows and lids: