...and fire!

Here we go with some dynamics stuff:


It took me the longest time fiddling with the animation speed, the catapult basket shape, and the firing tangents to get the rock to actually hit the darn wall... I thought it would be easier to just move the wall into the path of the rock, but for some reason it was locked to its original position... and the path wasn't actually the same twice in a row when I changed some seemingly unrelated factor. Ah, frustration. But here we go in the end, a simple playblast of a rock knocking down a wall. Dynamics are pretty awesome, I have to admit. Imagine animating it all by hand... what a pain.
Well, next up is some path animation I think, so I'll hopefully get working on that soon.
Later,
Stuart

Load the catapults!

New milestone here... :)
Posting a playblast (not a real render, really just an animated screen grab of the camera movement etc. In this short film, our hero Delgo conquers great obstacles and loads a catapult.


I don't know if you can tell, but during the animation, after he **SPOILER** releases the rock **END OF SPOILER** his hands go weird and swivel around a couple times. I tried fixing it in the graph editor, but I have a feeling the problem goes back to the rigging, so not really sure how to completely fix it. I know my wrists can be picky at times. The whole thing still feels quite rough to me and I'd work on a lot of details, but I'd rather spend the perfectionizing on my own project, so I'll move on to rigid bodies... that is, dynamics. Let's smash some walls with this siege weapon!
Later,
Stuart

Pickup animation

So I finally got back to my maya beginner's book and did some more animation of delgo lifting a rock onto the catapult. There was a bit more artistic license with this bit, though I still got through it by checking every keyframe against the book's... and he still looks a bit of a robot... haha. Here's a screenshot of part of the process:

Nothing too special. I'll upload the whole animation once it's pieced together. I think that's the next section in the book, i.e. combining the walk cycle I did and the pickup animation into a complete little clip. Should be fun.

I'm looking forward to finishing this book so I can order some training DVDs which I found on Digital Tutors. We'll see if that happens first or me ordering my new computer!! Yay! I'll post the specs once they're finalized, but it's looking really sweet right now...

Later,
Stuart