Late for work

The submission deadline for my character animation has been and gone, and as such I have another update to show. There has been a fair amount of work since the last update, though it's mainly been fine-tuning things to make sure everything feels as I want it to.

I tried my best to refine the timings of everything, and to make it seem more believable in terms of the movements. For example, I tried to offset the head with the up and down of a heavy breath, to make the chest feel like it carried a little more weight. There's also a lot of detail that went into the hands and fingers (made more difficult by the fact that there are 6 of them to keep track of). I think what I am the most proud of, however, is the exaggeration of the take. All in all, I'm very happy with the outcome of this. I may yet continue working on it, however.

So, it's been over a week since my last update so I ought to show some progress. First and foremost, I moved from the stepped curves to spline curves. I'll show what the first attempt at that looked like, because it was when I realised just how much animation information I did not have. Once I realised that I wasn't doing the breakdowns, I kept it mostly in spline, just so that I'd be able to see what the final animation would look like anyway.

Parenting and un-parenting things worried me, so I initially tried to just have the objects share position keyframes using a locator to switch between the two. Because the hands are, themselves, controlled and influenced by other controls on the rig, this didn't work. So, I spent an entire day making sure everything was parenting and unparenting correctly!

After the week, fixing the spline and parenting, this is what I have:

However, the first time I turned it to spline, it looked like this:

I need to learn more about breakdowns.

I'll have another update soon!

I'm very excited to do this contest! I've taken today to start blocking out my poses. While it's not as detailed as I know I'm going to need to make it, I think this is a solid start. I've taken the time to model a toothbrush (which turned out far too big) and a sink, and grabbed the rest of the props from substance assets (as per the rulings)

Tomorrow, I'll be improving this blockout as well as modelling a doorframe to walk through, and another wall. There are some poses in here which aren't the best, I'll touch them up tomorrow as well.  See you tomorrow with an update!!