This week I booked a meeting with Alan to discussed my animation and the ball issue as well as get some feedback on it to change whatever is necessary before polishing the animation, where making changes would mean a lot more problems and headaches.
In the meeting alan saw my animation and said some keys could be deleted and some movements were taking too long, as well as ask: “what is his purpose?” – This sure made me anxious but I understood that the goal here was not to change my whole project three weeks before the due date, but to actually understand what is going on there.
The character is literally walking nowhere, stops and it sort of looks like he is going to cross a street and gets hit by a ball, that just comes from nothing. It makes me laugh about it now, when we get too involved in our own idea and animated we can’t see some major issues with it. Sometimes is even hard to accept what someone else is saying about it. Alan was 100% right, while talking about the project I got to some new ideas that could be put in the animation and give it some purpose.
So, now is time to think where is he? Where is he going? what is happening? What do i want to tell? These are things I should have made clear in the beggining, not in the end of the blocking pass. The truth is, my animation was getting way too long so changes had to be made.
By the end of the meeting I had some ideas to decide, I wanted the raptor to be in the desert and the possibility of a herd coming through his way (a reason to stop) or making something happen, even some creature hitting him.
When analysing what was best for my project I sketched a storyboard, very roughphly just to set some angles and ideas clear. At first, I wanted the bird hitting him instead of the ball, which would make a bit more sense and the herd was actually a pretty good idea but maybe a bit hard to do in the little time I have. A dragon flying over their heads would also be a possibility in which they hug when they look up and see the dragon (that would not be visible on camera) bt then, how would that end?
So, a herd of bison was something exciting but I need to find a way to simplify that bit of animation, a cloud of dust and sound would probably do the trick. I did find some sound clips of bison and need to get some of a bunch of horses or something similiar running to then edit on adobe audition.
After doing the pros and cons of a lot of options, considering time and the goal to have a good animation to show in the end, this is the new script:
Ralph, The Raptor is in search of a smell he picked up when looking for his breakfast in the warm morning of the desert but hears a strong sound of something approaching, stops, sniffs the air and looks around to see if he could pick up something with his great sense of smell. When turning around, a clumsy seagull hits him in the nose. The seagull falls wounded on the floor, the raptor grabs her starts shacking her in frustration.
Suddendly, the sound of a herd is extremelly close, ralph looks at it, throws the seagull on the floor and runs away. The seagull crawls for help on the floor and a herd passes through.
I went looking for a bird or insect in the resource share and free3d, turbosquid, cgtrader and actually found a really cool rig of a seagull.
So, I duplicated the maya project file and deleted almost half of my animation, got the seagull in the place of the ball. I did have some issues with it as I could not scale it up or down, so after trying a lot of things without success I just sized up my scene and problem solved.
Playblast
I tried to use animSnap plug in to parent the seagull to ralphs hand but for some reason it is really only attaching the controll instead of the whole character, breaking the rig. So either i animate frame by frame, which are not that many, or I will try to create a locator, that I will use to parent to his hand without breaking the rig. But honestly, I don’t really know hoe to do that. It is something to still have in consideration and mention in the next FMP meeting.