Long overdue update.

Been a hectic couple of days, have just been focusing on the mime-animation and cleaning curves. The animation is now moved into spline-mode and I've been working on the clean up pass + detail since the last post.
It's moving slowly, but it's getting there. I never rush when I polish, since this is my last chance to spot any glitches and too smooth out the motion to get it to look as good as possible. So far Maya has been good to me and I haven't had too many issues. I did "lose" half a day though, but this was mainly because the spline-modes in Maya differs from the ones I'm used to in Max. Maya has a couple more than Max so I had to sit down and try and read up on which kind of splines I should use for my animation. After looking through the meaning of the different spline-modes in Maya (read about them in "How to cheat in Maya 2010" by: Eric Luhta), I found out that Maya 2012 which I'm using has a new feature called auto-tangents which basically is the same tangents as I'm used to from 3dsMax. The only difference is that the handles on the tangents are locked in Maya, which means I have to unlock them manually to adjust the curve. I must admit this is a time-consuming process and it tends to create some nasty overshoots. I already know that the polish for this task won't be as good as I want it to be since I'm still learning the software and trying to become familiar with a new way of polishing, but I am learning more and more as I work so hopefully I'm improving as I go.

So far I have gone through the first 400 frames, still working in bits at a time so this playblast isn't the finished 400 frames since fingers and some detail still haven't been sorted out. But the main controllers are pretty much done:



Tomorrow is another show and tell so I might be showing this playblast there, not that much point since I'm way passed the "feedback-window", but I might get some suggestions for detail.
I have been working hard to get as much done as possible before the voice-actor comes in on Wednesday, but I won't have a polished animation by then. But so far the linear and spline version does not differ to much time-wise so a half splined version should be okay.

Tomorrow is pretty much dedicated to finishing the idea for the 11 second club, since we are doing a reference shoot on that on the same day as the voice-recordings. I have not done as much on that as I wanted to so I need to dedicate tomorrow to getting my idea down on paper and solving the issues I'm having with the story.
The idea at the moment has changed after a chat with Siobhan so instead of having the Edna returning a cake I am thinking of her as a judge in a baking-contest that Mrs. Crowley is competing in. I also have a deeper and more emotional story I want to work on, but I think I will talk to Siobhan about that tomorrow to hopefully help me chose which one to go for. It's important that it makes sense and that the idea is clear and at the moment both of these are a bit weak.
- But that's tomorrow, good night!