Cubies: Week 4

This is what I was working on the past week:

• A few more fixes to my rig. The rig is now finally complete, I think, and I've done some testing on it by animating the first few keys and it worked very well so far.
  
  
• Fooling around with photoshop for a bit, I created a Rabiffe / Girabbit for a CG forum challenge. That took some time away from animating :)
  
  
• I created a character set in Maya that contains all the different aspects of my rig - IK controls, rotation controls, joints, lattice and blend shape. I think the main benefit of a character set is when using clips in the trax editor, which I do not plan to use currently, but I'm sure it will be useful along the way.
  
  
• I referenced the rig file from my animation file - the animation file contains 3 characters which are all referenced to the rig. Once I change the rig file all 3 characters will be affected. For example, I created the character sets after referencing the file, and 3 new character sets were added to my animation scene.
  
  
• Finally, I got down to putting some animation keys into the scene. I thought I would start out by keying the key poses and extremes - but as I worked I kept animating small bits, missing the whole picture.
  This of course yielded some very crappy animation :)
  
  I think the main problem I have now is timing - everything moves too fast, but some of it moves a little too fast and other stuff move way too fast. So I decided to look for some references...
  
  
• I've been reading Richard Williams' "The Animator's Survival Kit". I'm in about the middle of it, and it's a very good book.
  Unfortunately, it does not answer the basic question of "how many seconds does it take for a lifeless cube to grow hands and go live". Oh well :)

All in all, I think this was a rather good week, and I'm looking forward to struggling with the keyframes all over again once I finish the book.