One problem which did come up was when I was trying to constrain the eye aim controls into the hierarchy so it would follow the character when animated. The problem was with the aim constraint and the lattice I used, where the was a double transformation when the character moved or rotated his head, meaning the eyes would follow the aim constraint twice. I had to use the lattice as the characters eyes were oval and so needed to deform when rotating so it would'nt come out the eye socket. To solve the problem, I had to create a locator in the middle of the eye which the eyes rotation was connected to and then the locator was aim constrained to the eye control. Cant really claim the solution as Georg figured this out, but glad it worked anyway. The other problem I recently had was when i was creating the IK_FK blend controls i had a problem where my orientation of the controls was not matching that of my joints so made it spazed out but was'nt really a big problem just needed to reorientated the controls to match up with my joints. I did enjoy the rigging process as i usual do but would of been nice to have a bit more time to spend on it, as there are some areas I would like to tidy up a bit, like making sure all transformations are zeroed out and making sure my controls all move the same way but still happy with what I've done in the time I had, really had to work my ass off over Easter to get it all done.
So once the characters were all rigged I then needed to move on to painting weights which is just a really boring time cconsuming process but needs to be done. Everything went pretty smooth here only thing I would do if I had time was spend a bit more time only the smaller knights shoulders as I could make them move a lot better.
And next after that well actually it was before this , but anyway I had to lay out all the UV's for Justin to paint yet again another really boring and really long process. I do hate doing UV's, we did have a bit of a problem where what Justin painted was'nt really following the smooth mesh, which I think is because the UV's were low poly ones and I made a really low poly model so when it was smoothed it did stretch a bit. A bit of a solution to this was to smooth the mesh save the UV's and then unsmooth the mesh so Justin had a bit more accurate UV's to copy from, but still having a few problems especially around smooth corners but might just need to tweak the UV's in Maya to get those little bits right.
OK so after all that was done, someone had to do the block through and yip that someone was me. I did'nt really mind its just there were so many shots to do (76) and i was really starting to worry about time but just had to get on with it and it took me ages to do but its was really helpful as it brought up so many problems which we need to really watch out for when doing the actual animation. Things like the scale of characters, making sure the animations flows and characters don’t end up swapping positions and also the knight sword seemed to jump from one hand to another which we need to watch out for. We also discovered what backgrounds need to change or be scaled up and we did another edit where we did cut some shots that were'nt really need and changed shots around so it just made more sense. So was definitely worth it .
OK so that's all been done, we have two weeks left to do the animation, render out the different passes, comp it all together and add extra effects and then do the final edit. Oh and the sound needs to be done as well. So the next two weeks are going to be so so busy, really wish we had more time, just hope we manage to get it all finished in time
