Long overdue update

It's been a couple of days without any updates on the blog, but been working a lot on the animation after the last feedback. I sent an e-mail to Siobhan and Penny asking for feedback on tuesday night and got an reply from Penny on Wednesday morning. My reason was mainly to get a second opinion since I was pretty much ready to take the next step and move on to linear curves. The fedback I got from Penny was very positive so I was really happy when she told me that the animation was coming along really well and that I could move on to linear.

So far I've done the first 314 frames. I do about a 100 frames at a time so I don't have too many curves to focus on, it just makes everything a bit easier to handle.
Here is a playbast of the first 314 frames with linear keys:



So far I've had some issues with the x-rotation on the upper-arm when he does the rope pull, mainly because the increase in x-value is quite big on very few frames, which then causes the arm to snap. But this isn't unfamiliar territory for me, so I just had to take the time to work it out. Luckily it's just happened once, and that's far less than ever before, so I must be doing better breakdowns this time around - which is good! Learned a lot from my mistakes in the previous module which really helped me work around a lot of potential problems for this animation.

I am actually ahead of the schedule I made for myself, I was supposed to start linear yesterday (24th), but I've already been working linear for three days. The good thing about this is that when I did my schedule I didn't include; "First time animating in Maya" - which apparently adds a couple of days. I work quite a lot slower than usual, but I guess that's normal when you change to a new 3D software. I have gotten used to most of the controls and navigation, but I still work a bit slower than I would have done in Max, so being ahead of schedule is really a good thing for me at this point.
My personal goal is to have the animation done by April 1st, which leaves about three weeks to plan and animate the two person dialogue piece. And hopefully I'll be working a bit faster by then.