Animation Process

As mentioned before, as there were some issues with my rig, I had to keep this in mind when it came to animating and know what my limits were. In some places I wouldn't be able to push the emotion as far as I would have liked, but I still needed to get the right feeling and emotion across to the audience. My animation workflow for this project has been the same as before, blocking out the main poses before adding in the breakdowns then taking these into spline. When using spline tangents, I normally go for auto-tangent as this ensures that the curves do not overshoot and that you are able to hold certain positions. This has worked fine for me in the past, however sometimes I have noticed the movements can be quite snappy and not flow as well as I would have liked. Last week I did some other work for another project and this was using the actual spline tangents. I found that the flow of movements appeared more natural and allowed me to achieve a smooth transition between motions. I would love to have tried this on my dragon animation, however I didn't have the time and by the time I worked on this other project, the majority of the animation was already complete. I didn't want to try it out and then for the animation to look inconsistent with the rest.

Ideally I would have loved to have more time before I got to the animation stage of my project in order to properly plan out all of my acting choices for my dragon. I feel that I missed out on this due to my tight schedule. In order to have everything completed on time and to start rendering, I needed to be animating 150 frames per day, every day. I have tried my best to get across the emotion that my dragon is feeling but in places, it's not as exaggerated as I had originally anticipated. I think after this project, I might go back and spend more time working on his performance and getting a better animation out of him. Even though I'm not completely happy with what I have been able to achieve, I am glad that I have managed to get it all done on time as rendering is taking a lot longer than I originally thought. I also wanted to get the animation completed so that it could be passed along to Josh Broughton, the composer who is doing my music, as he too had a deadline to meet.