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Tuesday 27 July 2010

Wing Flaps



Despite being a different species, this slow-mo video is still a good resource. The diagram at the start shows the various wing poses during a flap cycle - quite a good place to begin the research, so I begin to get an idea of the sort of shapes the rig will have to manouvre into for the animator.

Early misconceptions include the range of motion from the shoulder joints on the downward stroke - if straight out is 0°, then the wing only rotates around the 30°'s mark; the rest of the motion is derived from forward rotation and the wings elbow joint bending inwards. 



More imagery of the take-off poses for the bird - bit unclear at the moment if the elbow joint is a ball joint or a hinge like a human elbow. When I look at some reference it appears to be a hinge and others a ball.

Monday 26 July 2010

Mel Requirements

Part of the USB mans rig requirement was to contain a mask visor that has a dot matrix display (very similar to the Daft Punk mask). This is relatively simple to set-up using a glow attribute, but I want it to scroll from right to left/left to right up and down etc. I would also like to be able to alter the speed at which it scrolls.

To do this i'll have to create a MEL GUI window with some sort of means for selecting the direction and an input box that allows the animator to control its rate by inputting a number.

Early thoughts are, in order to scroll from left to right the script will have to get the visibility attribute (on or off) for the dot immediately to its left, store that in a variable and then set that attribute on the visibility on the adjacent dot on a specified number of frames later. To scroll down the visibility information will come from above, to scroll up, the visibility will come from below and to scroll left from the right. 

Tuesday 20 July 2010

Showreel 2010



Quick montage of a couple of the characters I developed for my FMP. The sound doesn't seem to have survived the compression.