Thursday, 7 March 2013

Behave yourself! References are your friend!

I'll be first to admit I have bad animation habits. One the worst of which is steaming ahead setting poses without using my reference, at this stage I either haven't got any, its rubbish or I'm just not looking at it properly. Luckily I caught it early on this time and I've filmed some new footage and ive gone over my first poses again. I probably mention this flaw on a number of occasions previous to this, but its definitely something I need to work on.
I usually like to use a lot of different clips for different stages in the animation. My break down will usually include; General body motions, head motions, lip sync and facial expressions. Being only an amateur actor at best I cant get it all right in one take, ah well. One of the main reasons I can think of right now why references are key at this moment, is for things like weighting. If I hadn't been viewing my footage during my first blocking phase I would miss out simple things like putting weight down as a character leans. This is something that would be less fun to have to add in a later pass.
I'm still very much in the starting phase and I'm getting there slowly with Maya, I still find the flow of animation is less fluid as I would like, little things like selecting things and keying are coming to me now though. Next months entry will run much smoother I'm sure, this month will just have to be  the prototype.

Gotta run, apparently I've burnt my dinner whilst writing this... whoops.

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