Possibilities Expand

Well folks, after more than three years of trudging through the unforgiving depths of 3D graphics,  I finally feel as though I've got a hold of the basics.  It feels good.  My character animation ambitions reorganized and took another go at bringing down the rigging barrier after hearing the sweet tales of victory on the modeling front.  They were few, but they were a happy few; and when the smoke had cleared, and the field was slick with the blood of countless shoddy internet tutorials,  a dog came hobbling out on its hind legs.

Zombie Dog from Alexander Cooney on Vimeo

Previously, when I was doing that little thing with the green man waking up, I was using an animation technique called forward kinematics.  FK animation basically consists of rotating each individual bone on a skeleton to generate all of the movement.  Not only is it extremely tedious, it also produces completely unrealistic animations, even in the hands of masters.  Inverse kinematics, on the other hand, simplifies the process my making the armature act more like a puppet.  Instead of moving around tens of hundreds of individual bones, you simply grab the guy's hand and pull it around until it's in the right spot.  The body will react realistically to make your movement possible.

However, while IK is extremely handy to animate with, it's a far more complex skeleton system to set up.  You are, after all, creating the physical instructions for how your skeleton would behave in the real world.  Even with all this junk going on in my dog, it's a fairly simple set up as far as skeletons go.  Most will contain a series of restraints that dictate which direction joints bend, how far they bend, whether or not they can rotate and, if so, which axis they're allowed to rotate on, etc.

Simply put, this means I now know how to populate my movies with CG monsters, creatures, helicopters, castles, spaceships, planets, aliens,  arrows, boats, or any other goody I can think of.

That doesn't mean to say it makes the process any easier.  Hollywood doesn't pay visual effects companies millions of dollars for nothing.  All of this stuff takes an ungodly amount of time, talent and tedious labor.

But the end product is so tangibly satisfying and sweet that instead of complaining about how much a given sequence sucked to make, you can't help but start thinking about what you're going to make next.

Comments

[Martin]

Nice narrative.