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 Year 2 North Caulfield, 1999-2000
After
a year or so of whittling away at fragments of storyboards, animatics
and models after work and on weekends, it had become apparent that I
needed to dedicate more time to my extracurricular activity if I was
going to finish it within my lifetime.
I re-defined the
project as a "short film", which somehow made it seem
more important,
and
anticipated completion around Christmas 1999, after which I could
submit it to the
Siggraph 2000 Electronic Theatre.
With
my plan in place, I put in my resignation and upgraded Lightwave
and my
PC, although I stayed to complete obligations on the current game
project until May 2000. My frugal lifestyle had
afforded me around AU$60,000
of savings,
which I could string out to six
years or so, which of course was more than enough for a measly short
film.
 Now
that I had updated Lightwave to version 6, I set about re-rigging the
main character. This involves setting up the model so it can
be operated like a puppet, making animation quicker and easier.
I
soon learned that big feet and hands on short stumpy
limbs makes animating not so quick and easy.
Feet
intersected frequently - even a simple upright standing pose was
impossible -
arm movement was restrictive, and fingers deformed badly and
intersected
each other.In addition, the fact that the upper portion of his head was comprised almost entirely of eyeballs was impairing his ability to emote, rather than facilitating it. The problem was that the eyes were so cranially encompassing that there was hardly any room left for brows and cheeks, and the absence of a nose wasn't helping things either. It was the areas around the eyes - not the eyes themselves - that were needed for expression, and I had omitted them almost completely. A few limb extensions and eye socket enhancements later, and a somewhat lankier but slightly more manageable and expressive hero emerged.   A
more exasperating problem though was that the rig was plagued by gimbal
lock, a
phenomenon that was supposed to have been remedied with Lightwave 6.
Furthermore the software appeared to be incapable of
delivering
the rigging solution I wanted, despite weeks of determination and
consequent
frustration. After a while I realised that the time spent
searching for a
solution was outweighing the time the solution was supposed to save,
so I resigned myself to the fact that it just couldn't
be done. I would have to
move on to other things and deal with the ramifications later. |
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