Chocolate Zombie Day

It’s almost Easter Sunday and what better way to spend the time off work than by playing in Maya. I’ve been a little anal about the walk cycle and think it’s time to do a little more than fuss with fingers, head bob, etc.

I need to find a critique forum - a second pair of eyes looking at things would be invaluable right now.

Update on Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 10:33PM by David Coombs

Mein Gott I love the CGSociety.

It's little ... stompy

It’s the first attempt, slowly completing the final pass. Focusing on removing keyframes and smoothing splines where I can to smooth the motion while trying to keep it looking natural.

33 frame cycle broken down to 4’s.

Burnt hours on this, but learning to walk takes time right?

There goes my weekend

Graph editor. Is there anything sexier?

To put that in context, my day job involves analysing huge columns of numbers, building databases, then calling people and chatting to them about their workflow. It’s what tweaks your nipples right?

When I’m happy with this I’ll post video. Please critique.

It's alive!

This is my first walk cycle in years, model and rig is from the Gnomon DVD, and it feels incredible.

To have spent so much time as a silent fanboy made actually getting something to move a little stunning. I lost hours last night to tweaking and playing; lack of sleep will make for an interesting day at work. I haven’t been this excited since I was at RMIT.

There are a couple of things which let me get to this point: Firstly the Gnomon DVD which provided the rigged model and instruction. There’s enough which isn’t stated explicitly to make you figure out things on your own: both a good and bad thing. Next up has to be Dropbox which made moving files between Mac and PC far simpler. Doing most of the work at night on an XP box, throwing online, then picking it up on the train in the morning is wonderful.

So it looks like this path back to the goal may not me as vertical as first thought, it’ll just take a while.

Ticking away

Fxphd are this close to releasing the course information for their April term. Picture me anxiously queuing outside closed double-glazed doors, breath fogging the glass.