Final Post

    This semester, I originally set three goals for myself: animating a quadruped walk, creating a dialogue piece with three characters, and capturing a close-up interaction between a female character and an animal.  I found that I really struggled with planned projects keeping my interests. Once I saw a peer doing a face expression test, I knew that I wanted to do that too. I then started playing around with metahumans, so I planned to scan a friend’s face and record motion capture of him doing basketball themed actions. My goals towards the end turned into animating a polished cat’s quadruped walk cycle with a runway model’s bipedal walk cycle, blocked flirty themed face expression test, few shots of the custom metahuman doing various basketball moves in a park environment, and blocked small interaction between characters without dialogue.

    The quadruped and biped walk cycle took a lot longer than I thought.  I wasn’t paying attention to how the muscles interacted with one another when a cat walks because I was only seeing the bigger motion. I would bob the cat’s entire body up and down with every step when I should’ve noticed that the shoulder blades rotate up and around with each front step, and the hips push up with each back step and move opposite of the shoulders. It wasn’t until office hours that I understood that. I also ended up overriding my progress in the biped walk cycle somehow. This goal took half of the semester, but I’m proud of this work.

    With the face expression test, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get past the blocking phase, so I focused on pushing the face expressions. I could have pushed the poses themselves too, because the hands and spine felt unnatural with no arcs. If I had more time, I would put a motion trail on the hands and spine. Especially where she is gasping, I could have stretched the entire body up and included a little jump instead of just her face moving.

    I had lots of fun with the metahuman project, but I couldn’t foresee how often I would run into technical issues and spend hours reading forums to troubleshoot said issues. I got to the point of constraining and keying the ball animations. I at least cleaned up all the mocap data, so that I can continue it after the semester is over.

    I felt too overwhelmed and burnt out by my last project of characters interacting in a prison cell. After setting the environment up, getting references, and blocking a few poses, I lost interest. It’s still something I very much want to do in the future, but I’m too burnt out with how I rushed the second half of the semester.

    I felt stretched thin with nothing completed to show with every side project that I started. I made plans that I was excited to start, but I started them all at once. If I could do things differently, I would only do two projects over the entire semester that I was the most excited for. I would also not start a different project until I was fully completed with one. While I may not have fully achieved all my goals, I view them as ongoing works in progress that I will continue to refine and pace myself better after the semester ends.