Managed to get a decent amount of animation done for this week! I'm getting close to finishing it, and I would say I'm confident that I can finish it by the end of the week.
Obviously, it isn't perfect and I'm sure that there's parts that I can improve on. However, for a junior animation reel, I think it's not that bad! When starting out, I figured that it was going to be different to how animating a humanoid character is. It turned out to be fairly simple! Though that could be because it's a walk cycle and not something complicated. Something that I've also noticed is that I've been having a lot more fun animating this compared to following along with a set of tutorials. I shouldn't be surprised that doing my own thing is more fulfilling than doing tutorials, but I think I've been in a mindset of having to know the ins and outs of the animation principles before I can do my own stuff. Obviously that isn't the case, but it's something that's been in the back of my mind. I will get better if I focus on learning the principles, but if I'm not enjoying it, then clearly something is wrong with how I'm learning it. I might try to just animate stuff when I want, how I want, regardless of my skill or knowledge about animation. Thinking about it, it's probably going to be the best way of going about it. Maybe when I finish up this walk cycle, I might have a go at animating something more complicated with more body mechanics.
Next up, is a little sneak peak on for the intro animation I'm making!
I haven't really done much of the animation because my laptop has a hard time running the rig when I'm trying to move it around. It probably has something to do with how optimised the model is, so I'll have to get around to fixing that up. So instead of doing that, I've been transferring my materials over to Maya's Arnold renderer. I figured that I wouldn't have to since Maya has it's own built in renderer. However, after looking online for a little bit, people seemed to be in agreement that the in built renderer is only for pre-visualisation and isn't intended for a final product. Judging from my ZX8000 post from last year, I'm not surprised that people say that. Through looking at the standard surface node that Arnold has, it doesn't seem to dissimilar to something like Renderman. I've been slowly figuring out how to plug my textures into the node to make something that I like. Every render engine has the same inputs, but they just name them differently, it's just a matter of looking up the documentation to see what the inputs are. A problem that I ran into early was noticing that Arnold wasn't a big fan of the Normal map that I had made. This could be plenty of things, including it having the wrong UVs or being a type of Normal map that Arnold isn't made for. Something that I really like about Arnold is that it actually allows you to preview textures without having to render out a frame (unlike some OTHER render engine mentioned in this post). It isn't perfect, for example the shader I have for the model's body doesn't show up properly but I already know how that one looks so that isn't a problem for me.
Speaking of textures, I also had a little experiment using a low resolution gradient atlas to texture the model. While I am content with how it looks at the current moment, I feel as though it could be better. This is the video that I found on it. While it isn't guaranteed to work on my model (since I didn't model it with the intent of using this technique, and is for low poly models), I still want to give it a go to give the textures on my model a little bit of an extra panache.
That's all for this post! I'm happy with the progress I'm making, and I reckon I could have some cool stuff to show again next week!
Thank you and good-bye for today!