Shot Progression

Hey guys,

I thought it would be a fun idea to string together the different stages that my shot has and will go through up to completion and post them here. I usually refrain from showing the first spline pass of my work to people because it's usually pretty embarrassing. This version is no exception but it's not nearly as bad as it could be. in fact most of the glaring problems are the result of careless mistakes, such as forgetting to do the ik/fk switch on the arm over one frame and forgetting to use copied pairs for the hold around frame 162. Lol, both of those things should have been and usually are done during my blocking stage.

I'm trying a new workflow for this shot as well. I usually convert the animation to flat bit by bit. This time I did a very rough pass on everything for the whole shot. I'll then go back and start tweaking body parts throughout the length of the shot. I'm curious to see if this method is faster than my previous workflow. I think it is simply based on what the first refining pass looks like. I've never fleshed out a shot in the blocking stage as much as i have with this one and I end up having to reanimate a lot of stuff as the result. Since I've broken down the blocking so much, it looks like everything is essentially all there, if you can look past the awful arm spazzes and bits of floatyness.

I've learned something new already though. Previously, I would convert everything to flat and then go a genera smoothing pass on each translation and rotation attribute for every control individually. I did that for 98% of this shot as well. I was pretty tired by the time I reached the screen right arm, which was the last thing I worked on. For some reason I decided to hit plateau instead of flat and was pleasantly surprised. Now all of the tangents had nice flat holds with somewhat smooth areas between them. That's pretty much what I spent all day doing manually for everything else, lol. I feel rather dumb for just now finding that out. I could have spent today on the second refining pass instead of having to do it tomorrow. XD

Oh well, I'm glad I found that out though. Tomorrow I'm going to make a VERY long list of things to fix and will get started on what's usually a long process for me. We'll see how far I get by this time tomorrow night.