Long time no talk!
Sorry it's been a while since my last update. Of course, if you've been following the blog for a while then you know that October is an extremely busy time for my family. And, just in case you don't know about my other blog, feel free to head on over to Hollinger Hollow and check out what takes up most of my time during Halloween!
But, as you no doubt are aware, we're halfway through November now and that means it's time to start focusing on my main passion, Xam and Power Dog.
So, when I last left off, I had told you about my plan to work on a small scene with different characters in an attempt to get better at animating. The reason for the different characters is I wanted to try my hand at animating less complicated characters than the ones I designed for Xam and Power Dog.
Well, I was able to do a test video with a character named Jimmy to include some movement of the character but mainly to focus on lip syncing.
The first video (which is in a post below) looked pretty good to me, until I posted the video and on playback realized his eyebrows moved across his forehead when he turned his head. The reason this was happening was because I made his eyebrows out of a separate mesh that I just "placed" on his forehead without rigging them or attaching them.
To fix this, I simply deleted the separate mesh eyebrows and colored parts of the mesh over Jimmy's eyes brown, made another video, posted that one as an update and called it a day.
Wouldn't you know, although it stopped the eyebrows from floating across Jimmy's head the truth is I hated the look. It was flat and sharp at the edges and just didn't look very good. I tried telling myself that the point to this was to make the characters simple and it simply couldn't get any more simple than that.
Still, I hated the look, and in my "spare" time this last month I would check back on the video to see if maybe it started looking better to me and at the end of the day, no, it didn't look any better.
Sometimes I am amazed at what a small break can do to restore your creativity. I say this because when I opened the file today to work on Jimmy I decided I couldn't stand the flat, square eyebrows and immediately set about to fix it. Well, that took me all but 5 minutes. Seriously! The fix was staring at me in the face and the only thing I can figure is that I was so burned out I didn't see it.
So, without further ado, here is the update to the updated video I last posted. For those that don't remember, or who don't care to scroll down a little and refresh their memory, this is Jimmy borrowing a line from a very famous movie in order for me to test my ability to make him talk. Enjoy...
And there you. I swear, this will be the last update to this particular test video. I am finally, honestly, 100% completely happy with this test.
So now what? Well, I really am not sure.
As soon as I figure that out, I will let you know!
Later!
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