I animated!

Being long-term unemployed is a drain on a lot of things and a lot of video games played if your discipline is as suspect as mine can be.  This semester at my local community college I took an intro course into motion graphics, which was mostly Adobe After Effects with a smidgen of Maya dynamics/particles and Photoshop, and re-took the second level 3D modeling and animation course.  It seemed to work to keep me productive and learning.

Okay, deleted a stack of excuses and drivel twice now.  Let's try this again.

The MoGfx (ugly abbreviation, but you get it) class went decent enough for the first half of the semester with vector animations, Photoshop integration and puppet pins.  The latter was compositing video with sfx rendered in Maya... and was not my strong point and was very much a painful learning experience in the opposite.  So we shall never speak of that again.

My time management on this (The 3D modeling/animation class!) project was better than usual, but it drove home my weakness with painting weights and texturing.  I also don't like straight FK (forward kinetics) rigs (rig = skeletal structure and the joints) since they work exactly like claymation and pure IK (inverse kinetics) often have crazy issues with joints over-extending--this all makes no sense to most people, I know.  Somewhere in the middle of all of this is a rig I can work well with... I'll find it in a few years of practice.

My goal this time was experimentation within a moderate zone so I didn't break too much stuff.  Crashing and burning is easy for me in Maya.  The goal was to model something that reminded me of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman from Casablanca.  I got sort of close with him and only finished maybe half of her model for this low-mid poly range.

Issues:
-Need to burn down my Frankenstein rig and start anew
-His face is too flat
-His lower teeth had a control to animate it.  It broke at the 11th hour.
-That texture.  Inspired by Tiny and Big: Grandpa's Leftovers
-Jittery hands.  FK rig problem.  His drug wavering from his core (waist/lower back) made this arms wobble like that.  Was too hard to full de-animate it.
-The blendshapes for the facial animations needed more work
-Spent at least an entire night learning how to make an eye-rig.  He drunkenly stares forward the entire time.  Goddamnit!

Fun:
-Glass materials
-Lighting
-Decent camera jitter for once

To-do:
-New rig from scratch
-Practice low-poly modeling more
-Water dynamics
-Smoke/fluid dynamics for cigarettes and fire