Goal

This guy makes some great 3d models:
http://stroggtank.cgsociety.org/gallery/

I hope to some day be able to model, rig and most importantly animate some characters like that.

I finished modeling and rigging the bodies of my characters for this month's animation competition. I wish I had some better instruction on modeling cloth for animation. I might have some tutorials buried somewhere on my second hard drive, but I'm not sure which would have exactly what I'm looking for. Most tutorials deal with simple characters and no accessories.

Animation Club

I haven't had much luck in the 11 Second Club competitions. I ended up pretty much at the bottom, behind a bunch of other animations that weren't even finished. Well... Mine wasn't really finished either, but still. I'm developing some theories about how to get a better score, but in the end I really just need to submit a fully finished and polished animation.

There were a lot of problems in December that prevented me from doing my best on that entry. First of all, I didn't like the dialog. As soon as I heard it, I knew it would be hard to animate. Nothing really came to me, but I was able to come up with an idea that wasn't too bad. Fortunately for my Dominance War V submission, the deadline was extended to December 15th. This was not beneficial to my 11 Second Club work. Then I got a PS3 for Christmas. And will all of my extended family hanging around playing that from the 24th to the 31st, I didn't really get much work done to finish up.

I also had problems with my rig. I went through the Character Rigging for Production tutorial from Digital Tutors to complete it, which covered a lot of techniques I wasn't fully comfortable with. I thought I got a good understanding of what I was doing, but I didn't always understand why I was doing it. As a result of some error along the way, the female's finger ended up not responding to my keys toward the end. And the blend shapes didn't deform properly when I tried to use them with the characters in different positions, so I had to try and hide my lip syncing as much as possible, because it didn't look good. The arm IK(inverse kinematics) didn't work either, so I had to do it all with FK(forward kinematics). Which meant the hand was wiggling around all the time.

To sum up, my problems were:
-Not giving my full attention until Dec 15th
-Not giving my full attention after Dec 24th
-Bad blend shapes
-Bad arm IK
-Glitches in the fingers

With all those excuses out of the way, I shouldn't have any excuse for failure this month. Hopefully I'll be able to break into the top 50. It's all part of the process...

Here's a video of my entry, if your interested:

December Competition Entry from Shaun Martin on Vimeo.