Week 8 - A tough one

Ramping up to finals! Week 8 is usually one of the hardest weeks out of the term, mostly because its not the last week so there is a little temptation to relax but if you do then week 9 will be impossible!  I tend to over work week 8 just in case something happens in week 9.  Everything appears to be progressing on schedule (except from a little surprise in History of Animation) and the end of term is in sight :)

 For VFX I decided to try out a video game proof of concept.  I am using some of the assets from my space station attack.  I am adding some extra props and redesigning the characters too now that I have a little more time to do so.  I tried out using Phoenix FD which is a dynamic simulator plug in for Maya that Gnomon has a license for.  It was really fun and quite easy to play with.  I can see that mastering it would take a long time but I have a cool looking effect for my in game grenade :)  I have all of the effects done for this shot so mostly its texture work and a little extra animation this week.

 I am progressing with texturing and shading 2 but since its the only class I have moving into week 11 I will have a little extra time just to work on this project.  I am hoping to nail down a some extra texture work, tighten up the lighting and maybe add a small camera move.

 I fixed some of the issues from last weeks walk cycle.  It was hard inking the final poses smoothly, I was also really tired but I managed to add the costume too check out the walk cycle here.  Next week we have to do a 'take' which is a character reaction... I didn't know we were going to have that assignment... that really throws a metaphorical spanner into my work schedule :*( hopefully I can figure something out.

Well I don't fully know how but I managed to finish the modeling portion of my Hard Surface project! woop.  If I can find a little time next week I would really like to build a simple rig and have a very small idling animation but there is so much still to do in other projects.  I still want to render a turntable and wireframe view but I will leave that until class.