Time in Motion.

managed to fix the robot rig, am about halfway rigging the second robot pirate, just got to sort the facial controls out and it should be good to go.

the third pirate will be complicated. I plan to use a particle system to define states and blend between rigs based upon the state. this may or may not work, it needs investigating.

the fourth pirate will be more straight forward with a simple blending rig
i did design a 5th pirate this morning which should be simple and should move in an interesting way
the trick here is to make each robot look as individual as possible but as easy to animate as possible. i have decided that each robot should have something interesting to animate either a way of moving or a way of emoting, generally the robots are, in effect, moving props, the film only bother with a few main pirates but obviously we need some’extras’ to fill in the crew. i think these will be a lot simpler and probably be interchangeable

Well I have been assured that 4mations has not been canned and it seems to be undergoing a load of maintenance. which is kind of reassuring:)

managed to fix a bunch of issues on the rig, it was probably a good thing the rig broke because rebuilding it again I was able to take in the lessons learnt making the rig originally and re-make them a little more efficiently which should be good news when animating with the rig
on a downer, I have been told that animblogspot doesn’t not yet support chrome, hence all the difficulties i have been having getting video to embed. Looks like I will have to install another web client in the interim

so I loaded up yesterdays rig and…nothing

all the custom attributes I made had disappeared

started again with a blank set of CAs and added them one at a time re saving the file each time.

got everything looking ok, restarted max to see if all the new CA held together
now the scene is invalid

trying to find a recent autoback is proving complicated also

on a related note of things not working , i see that 4mations is still down. its a slightly worrying development. I can guess what’s happened, the plugs been pulled. C4 have gone to students and colleges saying put your content up and the students are interested but it takes time before any viable content would be ready.

I have finally moved into my house, a mere 4 months after buying it!! The first thing i did was to set up the home studio to do work in.

have spent a bunch of time rigging some for the pirate robots up the production. Got to re rig another robot due to horrible scale issues but i am quite happy with how this rig is turning out, just got to set up to wobbling Castor and handle head rotations

for another robot i have made a small tool to help automate animation tasks which i will be uploading a video of here at some point.