The eve of Christmas Eve

So it took me a lot of extra work, but I was able to make my own rigs to use in this month's competition. They're kind of strange and awkward looking, but they're my own and they work. Mostly... Some of the facial blend shapes I'm finding out now haven't translated so well. The arm IK doesn't work, but they have FK set up also. The Character Rigging for Production tutorial I went through seemed to be a bit excessive, I'll probably try to simplify it for next month.

So the actual animation for this month is coming along, finally. I probably wont finish it until the last possible moment. But at least I'll have something to submit. I'm not expecting a better rating than I got last month, though. With the Dominance War challenge delays and my repeated failures with fluid systems and pre-built rigs, I'm way behind my deadline goals. Hopefully January will be more fruitful.

DWV - Preliminary Competition Finished

Well, after being put off 24 hours, then 48 hours, then a week, the Dominance War V Preliminary Competition is finally finished. I think mine turned out pretty well, without a second to spare. I think my characters could have done with more than 6 seconds, but as that was the time limit, I had to stick to it.

You can check it out here:

http://www.vimeo.com/17859913

Hopefully I'll post it on my website, http://shauntm.com later.

Now I'm back to the 11 Second Club competition for this month. Unfortunately, there's no female rig but there's a female voice in the clip. So I've been trying to make my own. However, I've repeatedly failed at my female character modeling. I really have to do some face studies. I may end up just using the standard rigs. Maybe put a wig on one.

December Schedule

Alright, a week into December and I finally have my schedule worked out. I've got my own model coming along for the 11 Second Club challenge this month, and I'll have to make a female character once this one gets worked out. I'm definitely not Michelangelo of the 3D realm yet, but the characters should be animate-able.

The Dominance War V competition has been extended another week, which is great for me. I finally got everything to fit cleanly into the 6 second limit. The keyframes are all set, hopefully tweening wont take too long. I'm giving myself 3 days to do 144 frames, so I should be fine.

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I'm pretty disappointed with my rating at the 11 Second Club. I think it's pretty obvious that I wasn't going to win, but I was hoping to make it into the upper half. Based on what I saw while I was rating, I should have. But it's kind of difficult to say where it should land if it's not in the top 10%, since the rating from 1.5 to 4 the lower half and 4 to 8 cover the upper half. It's clear a lot of people don't really pay much attention to their ratings. I got some good comments, and some of the work that was rated better than mine obviously wasn't finished.

But there's no other competition website that I know of, so I'll just keep trying. I've got some ideas for improving this month, but it might be a couple months before I can break into the upper end and not have to worry about falling in amongst the garbage. I think unless you're in the top 10%, you really can end up anywhere. I think a lot of people go through and give random 1-3 scores for stuff that isn't their own anyway. The top scorer only had 7.86 stars, out of 11 possible. It was really visually appealing, and well animated, so I'm glad it won. But still, less than 8 stars for the winner? I think maybe they need to rethink their rating system.

Ok, enough complaining. I'm having a lot of fun with the Dominance War V challenge, unfortunately I think I'm really pushing the 6 second limit and running a little too fast right now. I'll have to cut out a couple moves to get it flowing properly. I finished a blocking test on Saturday.

I finally got the two characters for my Dominance War V entry rigged. I used a pretty basic rigging tutorial, so I wont have the flexibility of a professional rig like the one set up for 'Max', the rig I used for the November challenge. Hopefully I don't run into any problems that can't be fixed with a little extra keying. It's only a 6 second scene and there will probably be a lot of movement. So little things will probably go unnoticed.

Hopefully I'll have a chance to go through the more advanced rigging tutorial before I start setting up the December challenge.