So I spent an entire day last week trying to redo the animation, before remembering that I needed to work smart, and so after scrapping it, I went back to polishing my original animation. Whilst working on this one, I closely referred to a few Soul Calibur weapon demonstration videos on Youtube, and took advantage of the speed adjustment option... it was all good until I realised that I would take forever to polish it up before the deadline, and I learnt recently that fixing the inbetween frames is an incredibly tedious and long process.
Still, at least I gave it a shot in trying to make something better... maybe one day I will go back to it, and maybe by then, I might have learnt how to model and rig my own character.
I realised that there was still so much more that I needed to get done, and for a moment, I wasn't really sure where to start, and so I had to take a deep breath and write a little check list that I could follow... After that, I went back to polishing the inbetween frames as well as adjusted the key frames a little more, speeding up some bits, slowing some down, and making him pause a little longer in some other parts of the animation.
One of the glaring issues with his lip syncing was the fact that I didn't make him close his mouth during some pauses, and so I quickly added that in, and while it still doesn't look all that great, I believe that it looks a lot less awkward now.
One other issue was the fact that Moom's head was a little too big, so it got in the way a couple of times for more extreme poses. I thought to myself that maybe I should just let it be and so kept certain poses even if his head got in the way. I really wanted to show that he was absolutely confident in his weapon demonstration and indeed actually knew a few moves, and so some of these poses were pretty crucial.
I spent a lot of time trying to get the hands to look right, and just to be safe, I saved my progress on a few different files so that I could go back to one of them if I end up screwing something up... which really was the wisest choice I ever made.
I wonder now if there's a way to keep both constraints on the hands active without one of them going completely wonky... because the reason I had to fix so many inbetween frames was because the inactive hand did not properly follow along with the movements of the prop and the hand holding it, despite the key frames, that hand would move just too slowly, or would suddenly spaz out completely.
I really wish that I could have kept his eyes closed throughout the entire animation, because by that stage, it was so annoying having to animate the movement of his pupils (And seriously, they refused to cooperate with me most of the time!). And it just felt so unnatural if I didn't make him blink a little throughout the animation, so I had to do that too. There were just so many keyframes by then, so I got quite lost getting all of this done. I also realised at this stage that I had to create other quick select sets for use... and they had to be very specific ("Mouth", "Eyes", etc.).
There's always a new issue to deal with every single day when I open up Maya apparently... my heart dropped when I noticed that I couldn't get back my textures for the setting I had painstakingly modelled awhile back, and when I checked the hypershade menu, all the textures had suddenly turned to blank colours. What puzzled me was the fact that only the setting's textures were gone, while Moom and the prop still had theirs.
And so after reinstalling Maya, and restarting my laptop a number of times... I learnt that my renaming of the project folder (From "THIS IS IT" to "I'll Make a Man out of You") yesterday had caused it.
Everything went back to the way they were once I had gone back to the old name... So lesson learnt, make sure you go with a project folder name that you will want to stick with throughout... well, I'm sure there's a way of changing the name of your folder without any of this happening, but I will save that experiment for next time when I'm not so stressed out.
I wasn't too sure about the reaction time for him either when he accidentally drops his prop to the floor (I came to realise that one of my biggest weaknesses when it comes to animating is the response time for my characters), but I did the best I could with that bit (Having playblasted it several times), I'm sure I will get the help I need during the critique session this coming friday.
I also finally gave rendering a proper try (Which seriously takes ages... I think it takes almost an hour just to render 100 frames), I realise that I would have to add the audio back in after that tedious process... It just makes me hope that there will be an easier and faster way to render our Maya animation in the future. The one above is a playblast version that I made as a backup incase the properly rendered version screws up on me, though I am a little sad that the moon's lighting isn't shown here (Plus it also still has its audio! Though I might add in some sound effects if I have the time.).
I had considered rotating the setting so that Moom was actually facing the moon, which will then provide more lighting on him as he moved about.... But then I realised I couldn't as I remembered then that I hadn't actually designed the back of the dojo. Sure, I could take the time to make the wall... but then I also realised that I would have to add in a few dynamic camera angles just so I could show the moon. And so in the end I decided to stick with him having his back turned to the moon, I am still wondering whether I should give camera animating a try however (Though the static camera does follow the storyboard)...
In the end, it really came down to the animation of the character, and I think that's what I have accomplished for this project.
... It's still rendering now (Ugh, and I'm even thinking that I might have to render another version later on), at least my laptop doesn't freeze up during this process, so I can do other things on it while I wait.
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