The Big Picture

No, not that movie with the ubiquitous Kevin Bacon. The REAL big picture. What it takes to BE an animator and DO animation.

This week's lesson? I'm learning about how much time it takes to do good animation. (which is to say, I need to spend more time on my stuff).

There is incubation time, blocking time, straight animation time, tweaking time, evaluation time, more tweaking time. I'm just not putting in the hours, and its only going to get more time consuming.

I'm rushing. Im not thinking it through before I hit the software. My character walk this week would have more "direct read" if I knew exactly what I was going for. I just took my vanilla walk and starting pushing curves around.

I mean, I kinda knew I wanted an "ego" walk cycle. But its not easy to do with just hips. I needed to think that one through a little more. And in the end I found myself racing the clock to deliver my work this week.. beating the mark by only a minute or two. "Gotta turn SOMETHING in" is not the criteria I was looking for.

So here it is.. it needs some curve refining, and blah blah blah.. no more excuses here it is:

Character Walk

Exhausted Stu Pose:

What's my next move? I'm considering dropping a work day to get a head start on the assignments. Or maybe a half day. I'm always doing this work after 10 PM, (once I get the kids to bed and my wife falls asleep. I need to maybe crank up the waking hours a hair.)

What else? I'm gong to stay away from the cpu until Thursday. It will force me to get organized (cuz I wont have much time to implement) and will keep me from getting distracted with the implementation tool. Its a little like writing good code. Think, measure, measure twice, code. I need more of that. (Even if the plan is to work out a section straight ahead... at least it would be the plan and not "just the way it turned out".

Spring term is almost over! I can't believe it really. This whole thing is gonna be over before y'know it. Better get BUSY!

-Philro