drop the bomb productions

Recorded the dialog for Sugar this weekend. I was getting the characters ready for the animatic when I realized my rig had some problems. These are the types of things you don't notice until you finally start to move your characters around in the way you intended to. It was a problem with the leg IK. The good thing is that since I had used a very similar rig for "I'm Not Mad", I was able to fix a problem that had been bugging me there too! Unfortunately, I spent nearly the entire day on it so I won't get to start the animatic until tomorrow at the earliest.

I've finally finished all of the rigging for Sugar. This weekend I'm hoping to record the soundtrack. Then it's onto the animatic and preliminary animation.

This weekend I've been working on finish up Nick's rig. I finally finished up the armature itself, but getting it to behave properly is always a challenge. That's where I'm at now. Once I finish that up I just need to record the voices and then the animatic followed by the preliminary animation. Once the animation is finalized I just need to fix up Nick's textures and do the final render. Right now Planner is predicting 22 Dec as the finishing date for the "Sugar". We'll see how well this holds up. Rigging always seems to be the part that delays me the most.

I've been working on my programming projects recently - to the negligence of the completion of "Sugar". (There are only so many free hours in a day!) That problem with the armature really ticked the heck out of me. However, I hear the project calling back to me. I want to finally finish it and start up on some of my other animation projects. Right now I have to finish up the lower half of Nick's armature, the fingers (the part I hate the most!

I've been having some strange rigging problems with Wallace where the armature stopped attaching itself to bones after the first five or so. If I can't figure out a solution by the end of the week, I'm probably just going to start from scratch on the armature. (I had duplicated the one from Nick to keep the neat IK chains I had come up with)

I added a gallery with all of the screenshots I've posted to my blog from the production of Sugar. So feel free to check it out and get a glimpse into the production process. The link in the the navigation bar under "Galleries".

Went through Planner and updated all the tasks I have left to do as well as how long it's been taking me to get to these tasks. Right now it's predicting I'll be done by 26 Aug 2008. I have tomorrow off, so I'm going to see if I can improve on that.

I've been working recently on Nick's eyelids, something that's traditionally been very hard for me. After reading "Digital Character Animation 3" by George Maestri, I gained some new techniques for working on the eyelids. It isn't as realistic at the method I was horrible at, but I'm not going for realistic here. I just want a simple cartoon that will get the message across. I'm not a complex detail-type of person and the good thing about animation is that there are styles anywhere from minimalist to Pixar and DreamWorks near-realism. (And Square's almost hyper-realism)