Know yourself

  Often times when my children find themselves on the other side of  a mistake and we are trying to find the root of where they went wrong, I will ask them "why did you do it?" and most often they respond "I don't know". Well that is true to a point, often times kids don't look at themselves or their motives for why they do what they do, they are still forming, and getting to know themselves.

  As an adult, in my early years, I would say before 35, I didn't spend much time thinking about why I did most of what I did, but as time passed I learned that I could find greater success by understanding the underlying motives that drive my actions in life. The root of my actions begin at the core of my being, tracing the roots to the source I find the prime ingredients of who I am. By looking at those prime ingredients, or I would say the main reasons that drive my actions, I can build a plan that is in line with my reasons. By knowing my reasons for why I do what I do, I can choose actions that fit with who I am. This means going with the flow, not fighting the flow. There is greater success in being what you are than in being what others expect you to be.

Struggle to become an animator.

Everybody that is out there animating in 3D is using a computer system to produce their work. Mac or PC you simply can not do the work without the computer. Personally I use a PC because that is what I started animating in  and that is what my friends and coworkers use, so the software and hardware components we share and trade amongst each other is all PC based.

Recently I have been struggling with projects in Maya 2013 on my home PC and that lead me to take a hard look at my system and the software that I use. First I will tell you that there has never been a lot of money available for me to purchase a high end workstation, so I have always been forced to cobble together whatever I could afford along the lines of hardware. That being said I will lay out for you the specs of the system I am currently running.

Base System: HP XW6200 Workstation.

Specifications: 

• Processor: Dual Xeon 2.8 (single core)
• DVD drive read and write
• Hard Drive: 78gig Western Digital Caviar SATA 7200 rpm
• Hard Drive 2: Seagate 120 gig 7200 rpm
• RAM: 4 Gigabytes
• Video: Nvidia Quadro FX380 LP 512 ram
• Sound: Onboard sound
• OS: Microsoft XP Pro 32 bit

Animation is Planning

Weather you are strictly an animator working only on character performance, or you are a team leader/ unit supervisor, all of your work comes down to planning.

No one would start a project without knowing what the result should be, in the industry, not having a plan would be totally disastrous and result in the loss of the contract and your job. Even the best laid plans are constantly revised along the way to project completion. The point is, You Must Always Start With the End in Mind.

As an animator, weather you are a total noob or a multi-project veteran you must always know what you are expected to produce, not necessarily what someone else is expecting, but what you yourself are expecting.

Know Your Target

When you assume responsibility for your role in the animation pipeline, then you actively participate in building the plan to hit the project targets.As a team its important to formulate a plan that works, and then to work the plan, starting with the end in mind.

When you start a project, ask yourself what you are trying to achieve, what is the target? In this case lets say that we want to launch an android platform, first person shooter, with a military sci-fi theme. This will serve as a main project target.

Our role in the pipeline will be primary character animation, so we will be bringing personality to the hero in our game. At this point we have a pretty good idea of the main objective, so now we begin to ask more detailed questions in order to get a solid picture of who this main character is.

Adding Custom Attributes

Animators sometimes need to add additional features to their rigs to make animating easier, sometimes this means editing the rig. Pose Libraries are nice to have but its also nice to have some simple things like making a fist right there on the character controlls.

Here is some information on how to add the attribute to the control curve and then drive the action with the Set Driven Key feature in Maya.

Hope it helps.

Skin Weight Painting in Maya

 skin weighting in any application is a tedious task and can sometimes be frustrating, but hang in there and keep looking for tips and tricks to improve your workflow so that you can reach that satisfying end product.
 Although this tutorial is not a complete picture of the skin weighting process, there is some information that beginner and novice animators may find useful.

Some of the topics covered include;

• Use of the rigging tool The Setup Machine for Games by Anzovin Studios.
• Selecting the mesh for skin weighting from the viewport.
• Brush selection and sizing.
• Adding versus replacing skin weights.
• Setting and removing keys from control objects.

My hope is that this material helps.