Some more reference and another playblast

So been working hard on the animation lately so again it's been a couple of days without any updates
on the blog. I will try to make up for it now though!
As I said, working on the animation and it's getting close to the end of the piece now. As I posted earlier I like to work in parts (usually about a 100+/- frames at a time). I am now at 584 and think I'll take on the last 170 or so frames as one. It has it's more subtle moments so won't be too many curves too handle at once.

Maya is treating me very good, I must say I'm starting to "fall in love" with her/it more and more for each day. My work-phase has speeded up a bit too, so I guess all I need is time and practice and hopefully soon I'll be working almost as effective as I did in Max.

Since the last post I've done about 250+ frames in linear. I had a bit of a struggle with the transiton from Alfonso being pulled by a rope to the "ta-da" pose and back to the rope again. This part is definitively the biggest struggle in the animation so far. There was again a matter of the orientation on one of the arms, which made even the tiniest adjustment to one of the axis into a living nightmare. When Alfonso moves over to one side and builds energy to do the big "ta-da" pose the arms went straight out to the side, and it felt like I tweaked on the same 3 or 4 frames forever. I actually ended up deleting all the "problem-keys" and went back to stepped and built two completely new breakdowns. Wish I just did that straight away, but I guess I learned my lesson. I won't be wasting that much time when I come upon a similar problem in the future, that for sure. (I say when and not if because I know it will happen again.. Hehe).

I also came upon a problem with a small step Alfonso needed to do. He takes a step back when the director tells him to the box for the third time. And I saw that the breakdown I had doe for the foot was a bit too much. He lifted his leg quite high and this looked wrong, so I decided to do some more reference for the step to see how it should look.
Here's the reference:



The reference showed me that taking a step backwards isn't just a step forward in reverse. (If that made sense.. Hehe)
What I found is that when taking a step backwards the heel "pulls" up, compared to forward steps where the toe pushes the foot up.
So this made the step in the animation look a lot better and more correct than before.

Anyway, enough talk, here's a preview of the piece as it looks at the moment: