Lauren McKenna Animation Daily Update Blog: November 2015

So.
Here we are.
We've made it to the end of this project.
And yes, I skipped blogging the lighting progress - mostly because I forgot to screenshot it, and tomorrow I jump on a plane back home.

But I'm pretty proud of myself.

I learnt a lot of things throughout this process.
I started with really bold expectations - a huge storyboard, big ideas, and big designs.

Ideas that might've been a little too big, when working in 3D for the very first time.
I wound up simplifying out the jagged edge of her skirt in the final 3D model, and cut out the key in her hair - as cute as the idea was.

My initial storyboard was six pages long, and involved 9 separate shots. I knew it was never going to fit in the 6 second clip we were supposed to animate, but I had all these grandiose plans to fully draw out all of the panels that weren't going to make it into the actual shot, to give context and the rest of the story.
I also had a complex environment - and a second character! - both of which I simplified down a lot. The sign posts based around the tower are gone, and so is the extra character (and his horse).

These two pages were the clip I used to animate.

I also changed a lot of the camera angles from these, to accommodate for the removal of the extra character - shifting it to partly play out from his perspective, and to accommodate some... well. Poor choices earlier.

I'm proud of the character model itself, but...

When I came to rigging? I had no clue what I was doing. We had spider controls, we had weird controls that were done incorrectly - so when I hit animating, parts didn't work as intended - eg the hands, which I found couldn't actually bend to grasp the sword - which just made my life harder. The skin paint weights weren't great either - due to the fact that I made the skirt with two layers, these two had a bad tendency to overlap when the weights were changed, meaning that with both time restraints and a general 'too much will make this look worse', I had to avoid painting some areas, meaning certain poses were too complex to make.

Or - a basic character design flaw - the fact that with a head that large, she couldn't raise her arms high enough above her head to raise the sword as much as I wanted, without clipping inside her skull.
I made do with what I had, but I hadn't really given myself the greatest advantage.

When we hit the animating stage, I realised very quickly that I didn't overly enjoy the animation step of the process (which would figure, being a student at an animation school and all). I really preferred designing the character, and making a 2D drawing pop to life in a 3D model.
I struggled a little, with a less than perfect grasp of how to use Maya, and how animation principles worked.
So is it perfect?
No. Of course not.
Did I struggle, and make a lot of mistakes?
Naturally.
But I made it, and completed something I'm proud of, regardless.

Next year, I'll know better.

"Update your blog", they say. "Okay", she accepts, and then forgets to for another hundred years.

Woops.
I'm bad at this whole blogging thing (but I'm sure that's obvious by now, seriously.)

However! Progess is happening.
I fell behind a little when we hit the actual animating part, since I've realised a few things. One, animating a skirt is awful. Two, don't give the skirt multiple layers - why would you even do that. It's only going to end up with the two layers trying to go through one another, and it's going to suck. Three, I really didn't know what I was doing while rigging, and I've made this so hard on myself.

But, complaints aside, I'm filled with determination to finish this.