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Animatorinating, as it happens...
17 years ago
Friday.
9am: So to work! Time to finish off the meerkat transformation anim that certain people have been waiting for since before christmas.
9.20am: Next time I decide to animate clothing by hand, will somone noogie me till i come to my sences?
9:40am: Now the biped skeleton is misbehaving. Its freaking out because it didn't start off on the ground plain. Eeesh, its no wonder its taken me so long to get around to this.
9:45am: Turn music off.. need full concentration.... no.. need coffee more...
9:58am: I am, technically, experienced in Autodesk character studio. Thats what it says on my CV. But it still has the ability to totally fuck up my animation at a moments notice. And I can't for the life of me figure out why =OP
10:10am: Have link-constrained the bipeds feet to helper objects. This is like duct taping a robot to a rollerskate and pulling it around with a piece of string. Call me old fashioned but I like the stuff I animate to do what I tell it to, not what it thinks is best.
10:18am: Haha! That got the little bugger doing what he was told! You can see the feet fighting their constraints in places but I can hide that with a little finness.
10:48am: Wow, time goes fast. Got all the movements roughed out - what that means is a stiff meerkat teetering around in a single pose from the hips upward. Next comes the key poses, but first im off to the shops to get food.
11:40am: Yeesh, its cold out there..
12:25pm: The biped troubles are biting me In the ass again. Its not holding the poses I set it to, which is a pretty fundamental problem when your trying to animate something. =OP No choice but to hit the books and find out what's up.
12:49pm: Well looks like the IK blend setting is set to a stupid value, but I cant for the life of me figure out why. Im having to fight it every step of the way, but its sort of coming together.
1:20pm: *hammers at animation with mallet* it's coming together. Ive come up with a really messy workaround for the blending issues. Setting the keyframes on another biped then copying em across. It seems to work.
1:32pm: Then, all of a sudden... its behaving itself... Its letting me set poses without a single complaint. I sware I changed nothing =OP
1:35pm: I mean... seriously its working perfectly. Whats with that? =OP
2:25pm: Lunchbreak. Its all looking much nicer now the rig is letting me animate it. Just realised theres no facial expressions for the final head model, so ill have to model those and stick em in the morpher.
2:48pm: Lots and lots and lots of staring at the previews O.O
3:00pm: Looks good to me. Still need to do the facial animation but while im doing that ill fire up SCRAT (My render PC) and do a test render to check for anything the preview renders arn't showing up.
3:01pm: Yes, all my computers are named after cartoon characters.
3:02pm: Coffee time, yeee. =OD
3:45pm: Of course the tricky thing when your animating transformation is that the main character keeps changing shape. This means that for every stage there has to be a whole bunch of new morph targets for opening the mouth, moving the brows etc.
4:10pm: Lots more staring at stuff. SCRAT took 55 mins to render the anim off, showed up a couple of clipping issues, but thats it.
4:30pm: Right, put SCRAT rendering again on what may or may not be the final render. Depends if i spot any other errors =OP
5:05pm: Started work on the next anim. Finishing off a Deezlberries anim I was working on at FC.
5:39pm: *Stares at max screen as the hard drive churns* Pleasedontcrash...Pleasedontcrash...Pleasedontcrash... Bastard...
5:40pm: "Max encountered an error and must close. Would you like to attempt to save your work?"
5:41pm: Yes, of course I want to save!
5:42pm: "Max was unable to save"
5:43pm: Fortunately autobackup is set to every 5 minutes.. and im back in business..
6:40pm: Been rendering off the meerkat multiple times and fixing errors as I see em. Managed to get Deez walking to his mark. Now its time to cook dinner.
8:40pm: Ahh cloth... still rendering and re rendering, stopping the cloth clipping itself.
10:00pm: Right well thats the meerkat finished and posted to my *ahem* transformation art account. That about wraps it up for today I think =O)
9am: So to work! Time to finish off the meerkat transformation anim that certain people have been waiting for since before christmas.
9.20am: Next time I decide to animate clothing by hand, will somone noogie me till i come to my sences?
9:40am: Now the biped skeleton is misbehaving. Its freaking out because it didn't start off on the ground plain. Eeesh, its no wonder its taken me so long to get around to this.
9:45am: Turn music off.. need full concentration.... no.. need coffee more...
9:58am: I am, technically, experienced in Autodesk character studio. Thats what it says on my CV. But it still has the ability to totally fuck up my animation at a moments notice. And I can't for the life of me figure out why =OP
10:10am: Have link-constrained the bipeds feet to helper objects. This is like duct taping a robot to a rollerskate and pulling it around with a piece of string. Call me old fashioned but I like the stuff I animate to do what I tell it to, not what it thinks is best.
10:18am: Haha! That got the little bugger doing what he was told! You can see the feet fighting their constraints in places but I can hide that with a little finness.
10:48am: Wow, time goes fast. Got all the movements roughed out - what that means is a stiff meerkat teetering around in a single pose from the hips upward. Next comes the key poses, but first im off to the shops to get food.
11:40am: Yeesh, its cold out there..
12:25pm: The biped troubles are biting me In the ass again. Its not holding the poses I set it to, which is a pretty fundamental problem when your trying to animate something. =OP No choice but to hit the books and find out what's up.
12:49pm: Well looks like the IK blend setting is set to a stupid value, but I cant for the life of me figure out why. Im having to fight it every step of the way, but its sort of coming together.
1:20pm: *hammers at animation with mallet* it's coming together. Ive come up with a really messy workaround for the blending issues. Setting the keyframes on another biped then copying em across. It seems to work.
1:32pm: Then, all of a sudden... its behaving itself... Its letting me set poses without a single complaint. I sware I changed nothing =OP
1:35pm: I mean... seriously its working perfectly. Whats with that? =OP
2:25pm: Lunchbreak. Its all looking much nicer now the rig is letting me animate it. Just realised theres no facial expressions for the final head model, so ill have to model those and stick em in the morpher.
2:48pm: Lots and lots and lots of staring at the previews O.O
3:00pm: Looks good to me. Still need to do the facial animation but while im doing that ill fire up SCRAT (My render PC) and do a test render to check for anything the preview renders arn't showing up.
3:01pm: Yes, all my computers are named after cartoon characters.
3:02pm: Coffee time, yeee. =OD
3:45pm: Of course the tricky thing when your animating transformation is that the main character keeps changing shape. This means that for every stage there has to be a whole bunch of new morph targets for opening the mouth, moving the brows etc.
4:10pm: Lots more staring at stuff. SCRAT took 55 mins to render the anim off, showed up a couple of clipping issues, but thats it.
4:30pm: Right, put SCRAT rendering again on what may or may not be the final render. Depends if i spot any other errors =OP
5:05pm: Started work on the next anim. Finishing off a Deezlberries anim I was working on at FC.
5:39pm: *Stares at max screen as the hard drive churns* Pleasedontcrash...Pleasedontcrash...Pleasedontcrash... Bastard...
5:40pm: "Max encountered an error and must close. Would you like to attempt to save your work?"
5:41pm: Yes, of course I want to save!
5:42pm: "Max was unable to save"
5:43pm: Fortunately autobackup is set to every 5 minutes.. and im back in business..
6:40pm: Been rendering off the meerkat multiple times and fixing errors as I see em. Managed to get Deez walking to his mark. Now its time to cook dinner.
8:40pm: Ahh cloth... still rendering and re rendering, stopping the cloth clipping itself.
10:00pm: Right well thats the meerkat finished and posted to my *ahem* transformation art account. That about wraps it up for today I think =O)
I second SoreThumb too, this shows just how much work goes into 3D things! Some people just expect to produce them, or have them produced, just like a normal artpiece ><.
What you really need is all of us watchers to form a disorderly crowd around you, and whenever you show us a new key frame we can whoop and hollah like American games journalists!
That would cheer you on nicely =-P
This allows me to grumble about stuff as it goes wrong.. without talking to myself like a crazy person =OP
If it's any consolation, I have the exact same problem with rigs assembled from scratch in Maya. *rig* *animate* "Wait, why is it doing that?" *unrig* *rerig exactly the same way* "Huh...now it's working again....ARGH, why is *THAT* doing that?!!" D:
I mean, I put it together, I know what each piece of the rig is supposed to do, it just....doesn't.
Part of the rigging issues I have is that my version of Maya has set the IK 'flip' radius ridiculously high, and there doesn't seem to be a way to change it - I think it's hard-coded in. So if the elbow/knee gets more than half bent, it starts to rotate out towards ninety degrees from where it's *supposed* to be pointing. x.x
And of course, Maya's "character set" animating system tends to be buggy as hell....character parts 'learn' some sort of default value that is WAY off of what they're supposed to be, And until I get to that part of setting the initial keys, character looks like he's got a broken neck, or a stroke, or something. =P
So yah. That's why I hope for Blender to get further....than it has. If it was as lightweight of a 3D program as Maya, then any time we ran into something that was stupid in the code, we could just FIX it.
Unfortunately, Blender is far too monolithic to really ever become anything like Maya. :/
I can beleave it since the cut and paste tool is responsable for one of Max's more infamous bugs - where the clipboard duplicates itself every save... 2..4..8..16..32.. and so on until theres thousands of identical clips and your max file is 90 meg and takes several minutes to save =OP
I find tweaking biped to actually -do- what you want without constantly twitching or completely spazzing out to be a loooonnng day.
Oh, and *gasp* Doing fabric by hand?! Bad Deezl! Use Maxcloth!
I keep forgetting to add gravity and then bind the spacewarp. So I constantly end up with zero-g clothing ^^
So, uh, have any of these 3D programs incorporated Pixar's "untangling cloth" algorithms? (I'm guessing not?)
Havn't played with Max Cloth as of yet, but I'm sure to be getting there soon.