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THERE! Finished animating all the automated sequences involved in the first scene of the story. Going nuts staring at the tiny dots on the graphs that made up the movements of various parts and characters. I could've sworn i was seing little dots flitting about in my field of vision. Oh well, that's that. I will now begin to try and tackle the mountainous task of convincingly animating UNmarked.

Read this on the CGtalk forum yesterday.

Bad Animation is ...
When Character joints bend like cardboard.
When a Monkey walks like a duck.
When a tree blows in the wind and the branches go right and the leaves go left.
etc etc ...
It's Good Animation when it's Realistic. A Lion walks like a Lion for example.
posted by RorrKonn (http://www.Atomic-3D.com)

When a character's joints bend like cardboard.....But my character is made out of paper! *ponders*

Had a talk with Jeremy yesterday and was at the receiving end of..........some very nice feedback. It is now official that i will be taking out the scene where UNmarked tosses the desk caddy off the table due to conflicting directions. That scene seems to lead the audience to thinking that UNmarked is going to take revenge or something when what i actually want is for her life to go spiralling downwards from the point that she pokes her eye out. So bye bye desk caddy scene.

Optional endings:

1. Scene re-opens after the shredder and we see UNmarked's head lying next to the conveyor belt with the shadows of the parents and daughters passing over her.The world keeps on spinning despite her efforts and tragic end, which is really how the world works.

2. Scene re-opens with the familiar alarm associated with UNmarked's birth. But this time it's the parent's lights that are flashing red. UNmarked could've been happy or accepted if she had only stayed awhile longer.

3. Scene re-opens with a pull-out from a CU of UNmarked's face. We see the shadows of the parents passing over her implying that the world has not changed. We then realise that it's only the head of UNmarked lying there in a pile of other mangled figures.

http://www.jackals-forge.com/abom.html

I really can't believe how cruel the world can be. Beginners' work, put online and this is what they get.

1. After the daughter turns back to look at UNmarked, There needs to be a scene where there's something reflective in the scene e.g. Puddle of water, piece of metal sheet etc. so that UNmarked can see her reflection and know why she's different.
She then turns back to look at the printer machine and the other daughters before she sees the markers and pencils on the desk.

2. The Zoom in to the shredder will now be a PULL-OUT from a Extreme CU to slowly reveal the shredder. Camera continues to zoom out through the hollow eye of UNmarked.

Have completed animating the automated process of the blinking printer lights and have set some scenes into the render queue. Have proceeded to pencil tests on the jumping sequence for the parents. Will use the stills from that as a reference when i start animating the automated parents sequence next. Here's the test sequence.

Will start thinking of keyposes and acting over the weekend and come up with references for animating UNmarked. There are 2 ways that i'm thinking of doing this:

1. Capturing live acting on a DV cam and extrapolate/exaggerate the movements on UNmarked.
2. Draw basic poses on paper and run it through the pencil tester to get the acting part right.

Have optimized the lighting and the complexity of the little cables hanging around here and there. The rendering time is now down to 2 minutes per frame!

Have completed all the models and textures for the different versions of unmarked.


From left; Smudged face with hole in head, Just hole in head, Back of head showing the torn bits of paper.

Have finalised the textures and lighting for the factory. Rendering time fluctuates between 3 - 5 minutes per frame (depending on complexity of the scene) at 720 X 576, medium anti-aliasing, depth of field and motion blur turned on. If EVERY frame takes 5 minutes to render, it would roughly take 22 days to render the 3 minutes worth of animated scenes. That sits comfortably in the time frame that I have put aside in the production schedule with 8 more days to spare.

Am very happy with the way the new bone setup and the updated model works together. I can easily position the arms and legs where i want them to be without doing funny things to the model. Have decided not to go with an IK controlled head as it doesn't deform a flat head very well.

Here are some tests.

Thanks to lostpencil.com for a lovely reference. I've made this final rig and have found it to be very economical and easy to animate. The bones in the arm can easily bend towards the face and the head can easily be made to face downwards for a sad pose. Will duplicate this rig and make another with FK arms.

The legs are completely IK and driven by only one 'goal' each. The other nulls were put in there only to keep the feet pointing downwards. The spine is controlled by FK as it allows for more control.

Will proceed with posing tests tomorrow.

Production Schedule has been set up and can be viewed here.

Have gotten a hold of a fully rigged Lightwave character (special thanks to http://www.lostpencil.com for the free model of Noodle). Will now break attempt to break the rig down to bite sized chunks to understand the setup and I will hopefully be able to rig my character the same way.

Okay I must admit that I have achieved more in the animatic in the last 5 days than in the last couple of weeks and this is making me much happier as it is now telling the story alot clearer than the first and second draft. Have decided to render still frames of the movements from Lightwave and composite them together in After Effects for the animatic. Still have one more scene to go on that one. Should be done latest by tomorrow.

Have been reading up on Inverse Kinematics and Forward Kinematics because the current rig, although works very well for walk cycles, is crap at deforming the body of UNmarked when it comes to more emotional poses e.g. crying or burying her head in her hands which, compared to stomping around looking dejected, ARE essential to the telling of the story.

I will finish the animatic by Wednesday (Latest) and work on the idea of an IK/FK hybrid rig (IK for the legs and head turns, FK for the spine and arms).I really hope that works. Will also need to add more subdivisions to the models to allow them to move a little bit more like paper. Currently the joints are breaking as if the characters are made out of corrugated cardboard or something. NASTY!

Just wondering if anyone can let me know if Lightwave7 has a feature of switching between IK and FK within one rig (like in Maya). That would be very welcome.