Week 28: The Ball is Really Rolling
- Andrea Krebbers
- Mar 5, 2023
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 26, 2023
It's been two weeks since I last posted here, but to be fair they have been some busy weeks! With Spring Break around the corner (marking a brief calm before the storm of rending and production for my April deadline), I've been working largely on polishing my first batch of 3D animations!
I, unfortunately, encountered some issues *again* while working on polishing my animations, where my new unified rigs were offsetting in odd ways in my animation files, and creating a massive amount of random nulls and joints in the files out of nowhere. The offsets unfortunately were also reflected in my skinned meshes, so I had to figure out what was causing these issues first, especially considering how they made my object hierarchy a pain to work with as well.
I was able to resolve the object hierarchy issue along with some of the offsetting issues, and after consulting with my professor (thanks again Brent) we figured out the odd finger offset in Arne as well! This delayed my animation polish much more than I would have liked it to, but here's hoping that I don't run into any more major rigging/technical issues again (*knock on wood*).
On the bright side, with all of that resolved, I was able to dig in and start working on facial expression animations and animation polish! This has involved a lot of fiddling with the pose morphs and the F-Curves for the animations to help make them look more natural, but now that I've started them the polish animations have started going by quickly! This is largely because my layout animations wound up having multiple passes done on them when I was originally making them. I've been able to focus more on minor polish and editing the animations here and there to make sure everything deforms properly with the skinned rigs, which is a good feeling! Some shots have changed as I've worked on them and changed things up depending on critiques I've gotten, but everything is definitely coming together much more tightly now and I'll have the first batch of polished animations done by the next milestone on Tuesday! Some of them could still use some additional/final polishing (especially the ones I changed dramatically/reanimated), but I will revisit those later with fresh eyes when I have more time to do them. Overall though, these are much closer to what they'll look like in the final film, which is very exciting!
And on the subject of news, this week something else new has come up: I've changed my film name! My film's name was originally An Toll Dubh, which is the name of the song that originally inspired my film 3 years ago, which was an arrangement made by Marcus Warner of the song 'An Toll Dubh' by Runrig. While I was very attached to this film name as it was my original name for it, since my film isn't being set to that song anymore, it no longer felt like it fit thematically. This is especially true since the original song is in Gaelic, with 'An Toll Dubh' translating roughly to mean 'the black hole' or 'the dungeon'. Obviously, neither of these translations fit my film, and since my main inspirations for it have been Viking/Nordic myths and styles, the Gaelic aspect didn't quite fit either.
As a result, I've changed my film name to 'Veidirrin', which in Old Norse/Icelandic roughly translates to 'the hunters'. This obviously fits much better thematically and stylistically with my film now, and is a more appropriate representation of it! This news is also very timely, as I'm going to begin working on my film one sheet in the next few weeks, which will include the new name!
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