Quick bit of progress made on the ball this week. Just working on the step blocking method we were taught in our a while a go. This second attempt of the ball animation is definitely more organised, step blocking is certainly the right method for me. (Though I've taken it to spline to make the playblast a bit nicer.)
Another note is I've changed the ball. My first attempt was a generic sphere with the pivot at the bottom, this is a far more sophisticated ball rig, with nice squash stretch and bend controls.
The rig is free to use from a website made by the authors of "How to Cheat in Maya". ( http://www.routledge.com/cw/luhta-9780240525907/ ) The rig is from the 2012 version of the book that I got as an early christmas present. (another reason why I wanted to restart the animation from scratch.)
The Backwater Gospel is a short film produced by a group from the Animation Workshop (http://www.animwork.dk/en/).
This has to be one of the most memorable things I've seen. I love the artistic style, the dark story, the music fits well with the feel and sounds professionally produced.
The overall film is very stylized, making use of highly painted textures, and toon shaders to give a 2D in 3D feel which they've achieved very well. It's a style I feel can easily go wrong, but when it's done right it can look amazing. Personally I think this is one of the best examples of this style of rendering around. The only other example I can think of that would beat it is maybe the Borderlands 2 game, and considering this was an amateur production with no budget, that's a pretty good standard to come second to.
The posing and animation were also very stylized. to match the 2D, painted aesthetic they stretched limbs outward giving a similar look to as if it were puppet animated in something like After Effects or Flash. Perhaps some parts were. The lip sync was a tad off, though that could be from uploading to youtube. As far as I'm aware they had to animate textures to get the characters to talk, that or it was some post production magic. Which is a pretty inventive way of going about the task, though it certainly solves an issue of trying to make the 3D look 2D, as when a 3D model talks, the mouth shapes have far more depth than what can reasonably be achieved in drawn animation.
The story in itself is relatively simple on the face of it. Though I'm sure it's meaning is a lot deeper! The director of the film is working on making a feature length script for Backwater Gospel which is awesome.
He also posted up a lot of "making of" assets which are very interesting.
The Ball animation progress has halted again... I just can't seem to enjoy it. The task is to keep the animation inside 10 seconds, which I think I've realised is a near impossible task, and so carrying on with a failing idea seems a bit pointless.
So I've had a look at it again and decided to come at it from a new angle. Literally from a new angle, well, not me... the ball...
Basically I was wasting a good 3-4 seconds simply introducing the ball into the scene before he even interacts with the shape sorter, giving me no real thinking time what so ever. So instead I'm having the ball enter from behind the camera... Also making him a bit more squishy than originally planned.
