Spent a reasonable chunk of the past weekend working on "A Civil Discussion," in between rounds of Balla-cappin'. At this point I'm probably somewhere around 1/3 of the way done with the animation, give or take. While I'm enjoying the process, I have to say that one of the things that gets left out of all those "making of" featurettes looking at 3D animation is the fact that a good chunk of the process is just grinding through the same few seconds over and over and over while you try to get the timing and expressions just right. What's worse is that when you're trying to sync to an audio track you don't have the option of cranking up iTunes while you're working. Guh. Turns out I'm only good for a couple hours of keyframe animating before my attention wanders off.
Fortunately, there have been some opportunities for streamlining things. After doing the basic mouth animation for laughter, I was then able to write a small script to take that animation curve and create a new one for the shoulder shaking that I wanted to add. Now that was gratifying.
Posted by Jason at January 18, 2005 12:36 PM