Chasing Tail Animation and events - Part 2

Good evening everyone, don't have a lot to show for this post but I'll try and beef it up as much as I can with some other news. So I had continued on with the chasing tail animation where I have finally moved to Maya and had begun animating. Blocking out the poses took a while as I really wanted to make this work out perfectly...no such thing as I slowly progressed. Each pose took me about 10- 20mins and that is still pretty quick as I've heard animators from the industry sometimes take as long as one hour for one pose.

You may notice that some parts of the animation that I haven't animated, most notably the tail from the Nico rig. The reason for this was because it had got to a point where it was a bit overwhelming animating, as I had to focus on the body, feet, head, shoulders and etc. So to help relieve the load of work, I then decided that it would be best to animate the tail, ears, mouth and eyes at a later point of the workflow, as these can be easily animated afterwards on spline mode.

So at the moment, I have splined out the poses and focused on the timing and spacing. I then begun to review the squash and stretch poses. This is taking a while and I have estimate that I'll have this project done, near by the end of April, slightly longer than I had hoped but, it's something that I want to polish.

A few weeks ago I had registered with Escape studios with a free webinar of "how to animate a multi-legged creature" by Alexander Williams but that was delayed, until today. I've learnt a few neat tricks in Maya, though it's something as embarrassingly simple as copy and paste, as I never knew how to do it...silly me. Anyway the one elusive question I had on my mind was that "how to prevent sliding on a foot?". I was hoping to be given an answer, like a formula, how you must take into account of this and that together. But unfortunately, Alex answer was pretty vague. It's something that I have wondered how industry people resolve this problem. I will probably go back to another tutorial that has already mentioned how to fix this sliding, as hopefully, I will understand it more than I did back then.

Besides that, Alex was able to deliver a simple tutorial on how to animate a multi-legged creature, in this case a tarantula. I simply made one below but I will revisit this project again, as I want to try something else that I've been thinking of doing plus, adding some personality to it will help my showreel go a lot further.

I was able to talk to one of my cousins boyfriend "Ashley" who has had the chance to work on a series of MPC films like, Dark Shadows, Prometheus and most recently, Man of Steel. It was a pleasure meeting him last year at the VFX festival and he has again been able to offer some great advice on what I could do, to help get into the industry. Something that he has mentioned and now really bugs me, is the Creative skillset VFX animation recruitment event, gosh that is a mouthful to say. Anyway, this was one of the places that had helped Ashley land a role as a roto-scope at MPC, as he had talked to one of the directors from the Creative skillset event.

Creative Skillset

Going to this event would be a dream as it's possible that I could make some connections and start somewhere with my career. Though it is invites only and more orientated to students, Ashley had said that he would be able to get me in. Just having a chance would make such a difference in my career. The problem though is that the event has yet to be confirmed and that last year event was in July. If it does fall down to July this year, then unfortunately, I will miss the chance of attending, as I have made arrangements of a holiday during that time.

I would be devastated to miss this event but, you know what, sometimes that is how life works, you have to sacrifice some things in life even if it means that job. It's not all doom and gloom. I had then compiled all of my animations together so far and looked at it as a whole and if I could say one thing about it, it's that I'm heading the right direction if I keep at it and have 100% faith in believing that I could break into the industry.