And I mean it!  I finished the rig today, so that means, from now on I'll be playing with animating!

I'm posting a picture of what the rig looks like under the mesh, as well as a render of some morphs of the face.  The face rig is done with helpers and morph targets.  The helpers are simply little boxes that I threw on the surface of the cat's face, lining his brow ridge.  Each helper influences a certain part of the brow, so when I drag a helper and change its position, the brow changes with it.  Morph targets are basically transforming vertices.  That means that I take a vertice or a point on the mesh (the cat is made up of tons of vertices, edges and faces that are then smoothed) and change it.  The morph targets transform between two shapes where one shape has vertices transformed.... if any of that makes any sense.  So, I make a bunch of mouth shapes, and I can morph in-between them, and only the mouth will be affected by these morphs.

I just recently animated a ball bouncing, just to throw off some rust and get started in an animation mindset instead of a modeling/texturing/rigging mindset.  It went well, and the next few days I'll be playing with the rig, probably trying out a walk cycle, maybe some other fun things.  Next week (Fred encouraged me to stay after the time limit of the senior project to finish this up and get something animated and rendered out for my portfolio, so I'll definitely be staying a bit longer) I will be getting a sound clip from Eric (one of his friends here, who's an animator) and he'll help me with getting a performance out of my cat!  I'm FRIGGIN EXCITED!

He also handed me a book to look over while I'm here.  He said it's easily one of the basics, and I'm definitely thinking about buying the book.  It's called "The Animator's Survival Kit" written by Richard Williams (The guy who directed "who framed roger rabbit.")  It's great for the basics and easy to understand, so I'll definitely be reading that as I continue.

Thanks Nance for the compliments!  I'm glad to hear I'm doing well.  As for the reflection piece, it's hard to say right now.  I would say of what I've done so far, the classes at Catlin haven't taught me a ton pertaining towards this subject, except perhaps how I percieve things visually and perhaps any style I've continued to develop while here.  This is simply because what I've been doing so far is very technical.  My guess is that when it comes to animation, the classes will provide a bit more background for me, as we've been working in film/animation instead of actual modeling/texturing/rigging.  For animation I'm sure senses of movement, editing, etc. will certainly help, though they normally have seperate editors from animators (of course, any editing for my piece will be done by me!)  Though I'm sure I'm not thinking of everything, as I've learned a lot at Catlin and a ton outside of Catlin as well... so it's hard to say anymore what came from where!

So, after all that writing and talking... here's some images to fry your brain!

Edit:  This is pissing me off.  Whenever I upload images with text, it posts my blog entry without any text.  It just erases it.  Luckily I got screwed over by this last time and had to rewrite blog posts, so I thought ahead and copied my text before posting... but really?

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