Fear Final & Thoughts

As I'm calling this animation done now I though I'd make a post of the final version for this module and also talk a bit about what I learnt while making it.

After finishing the last module, I made a list of things I'd like to learn more about in order to develop my skills further, which can be seen in this post here. The main issue I really wanted to get to grips with was the curve editor in order to understand more about 'splining' so I could really enhance my animation further.

I decided to while doing this animation that I was going to play around with the curve editor more in order to get a much better understanding of exactly how it works and how I could really exploit it to make my animation look a lot better.

Whereas I really haven't reached the peak of where I want to be with my animating I can definately say that through the process of this task I have definately achieved my goal of understanding how the curve editor and splining works and I no longer feel wary and overwhelmed when opening up the graph editor and seeing loads of curves for all the body parts. I actually found it really enjoyable and got engrossed when i started playing around with the curves for each part of the body and watching the effects it had on the animation.

I also played around with it by experimenting with simple animation on a basic box shape which really emphasised much more clearly what altering the various curves has on the animation eg. eases in from point a to b etc. 

I still think more experimentation is needed and if I had more time I would like to have made a few more passes over this piece to polish some parts of it further, but as there's now only around 2 weeks left for the other 2 tasks then I don't think it would be wise.

While looking at this list, I can also say I understand more about FK and IK and prefer animating with IK after my experiences with the Dance animation. I've found that I don't seem to have problems with gimbal errors when using IK.

So yes, I'm definately pleased with this piece. I reckon it's one of, in not my best piece of work so far! I'm hoping the next two animations for this module with be just as good or even better!