Once more we are back at it again for Course Time! Got some lovely recollection to spill!

Since this was the first proper week of the course, this is where we actually started to do some proper animation! For the start of the course, we've been doing a lot of asset animation. This has been comprising of a bunch of car and vehicle animation. While it isn't the first choice for what I would want to do for animation, it's certainly a good start to get used to the animation tools in Maya. With Victor's animation experience, it's been a blast! I've been taking plenty of notes that are going to be very useful down the line!

Something that's also been surprisingly interesting is the wide variety of people that we get to talk to during the Ditlos. One of the more interesting ones what a talk from somebody that is in the team for the company's machine learning department. I'm not particularly a big fan of machine learning because of all of the low quality garbage that it can spew out when given to the hands of the public. However, when given to people that are conscious of how the technology works and the legal considerations when using it, it turns out to be a very interesting aspect of film making! One of the examples that was shown was of a stunt double of an actress' face being edited out through machine learning to the face of the main star. Considering how much of pain it would be to otherwise do it, it seems pretty cool! I'm on the stance that if Ai is used ethically, legally, and with the intent of removing tedium without removing the artistic intent of something, then it's pretty alright. I start to get a bit upset with Ai where it just regurgitates information that it's given to provide a barely legible answer and people just go with it.

A very exciting event that's coming up is a trip to a Uni campus to try out the motion capture suit that they have over there! I haven't really seen the process that goes into making a good mocap animation, so it will be very cool to see how it gets made! We've also started to use Animbot for Maya, which is a really lovely tool that makes the animation process a lot easier! One of the features I quite like is its ability to make keys that are already on the graph ease in and out of each other. There's a whole bunch of other features that are really good that I haven't gotten around to play with, but I plan to in the near future with my other class projects coming up!

That's all for this week! I reckon that this is probably around the length that these posts are going to be. Sadly, that means that they aren't as interesting as my This Week posts. I also don't particularly enjoy writing these posts as much as the other posts since I can't shown anything, but I hope to get some things done in my own time as I get better at managing my time at home.

Thank you and good-bye for today!