Today’s session didn’t go well.
I unwittingly bit off a bit more than i can chew. Kind of like the animation equivalent of fighting giants in Skyrim. Once you level up and get a good enough warhammer (Dragonbone is good) you can bring them down quick-smart. Until then, they’ll happily knock your noob arse into orbit if you try to take them on.
I had a dream about a guy throwing knives at me, so i decided i might try to do a knife-throwing sequence. The knife turned into a boomerang for some reason – boomerangs look cooler than knives, probably.
This was my first time using video reference. I learnt a lot about effective video reference. For instance, loose pants are a no-no because you can’t see where your knees are. Lighting is good so you can see where everything is. And so on. I also learnt that video reference is as much a curse as a blessing if you take it too literally, because if you want to get detailed it gives you a really tempting rabbit to chase.
Blender’s grease pencil and background image features came in handy because it meant i could rotoscope keyframes directly into the modelling/posing area.
The first warning should have been that instead of doing a 136 frame sequence, i chose to only do 19 frames of animation. Less than a second. Much more the kind of thing i can do in a single day with my skill level.
It took all day to even get those 19 frames to the not altogether stunning point you can see here.
The first pose was like pulling teeth to get out but then things kind of fell into place for the blocking. The poses seemed OK. Then i went to splining and tried to do a timing pass and.. yeah. It just got unmanageable, the foundations i’d laid down in blocking weren’t that great, and it was just a spiky frustration sandwich.
So it’s been a hard day. This was much harder than i thought it would be. But this is the practical education i wanted to get for myself – hands-on tearing my hair out.
The boomerang isn’t stuck to the character’s hand properly. The left hand wobbles around. The throwing motion itself just doesn’t sell it for me. The weight just isn’t there. I mean, it’s not terrible. It’s probably better than Oakie’s Outback Adventures. That’s saying nothing. It’s just.. noobish. And it took all day. Slow and crap.
I give up for now. I’ve been getting reminded all day how horrible my art fundamentals are and i’m done grinding against my current lack of skills. Have to save something for the day job.
