Perv's Diary: Week 43

Hey there folks! For this diary we'll have one last look at the upcoming releases for this month. Both videos will be posted on the weekend, stay tuned!

For the next month we are going to have the Barbara patron project, I'll stick only to one release for next month in order to have the proper time to reorganize my entire workflow to start producing more complex videos.  A while ago I shared some of the complete overhaul I'm making to my projects, first I talked about rendering methods, today we're gonna have animation mumbo jumbo! 

If you are interested in the technical aspect of animation it may be an insightful post! As for the news there's nothing more.

Now for the mumbo jumbo:

For me animating has always been a huge challenge, since I actually never had much experience, it may be hard to believe but most of what I've learned was from making Triple R projects, which ended up helping me on my main duties.

There are basically two methods of animating, pose to pose and straight ahead. I mostly always did pose to pose, simply due to insecurity, when you start to animate you see how chaotic the process can become, you have multiple things to work out, to worry about, from the very basic body movement to the little details which make the animation much more believable.

So how to not go crazy when you're just a noob?

What I always did, and I still kinda do is to be extremely methodic, I always animate part by part, usually in the same order. I always start with the hips and spine, to get the basic flow of what I want, then I go for the arms, legs, fingers  and so on. The facial animation I always leave for last. Problem is I used to do everything in pose to pose, now to explain the actual method, on pose to pose you mark the extremes of the animation, so you make the pose where the animation starts then make the pose where the animation ends. Only then you start to work on the in between. Different from Straight ahead, as the name suggests, you simply  go animating following how the scene goes.

Due to my inexperience what I always did was use simple loops, both on the body and face of the character so I could manage to animate without losing myself.  After so many projects I feel much more confident as an animator, I'm already animating many of the projects for the second half of the year. The Widowmaker patron project being an example.

In the case of the body animation, I'm now making longer, more complex loops to make the sex look more natural, while on the facial animation I complete dropped the pose to pose method, I'm doing everything with straight ahead method. I'm also pushing myself to do proper lip sync, which has been very exciting so far. 

What I'm doing now is actually importing the voice files into my 3D software and giving my best at perfectly matching the character's mouth with the voice file. This is really making the animations look much more natural, I'm extremely excited to see how they will turn out in the end.

I believe that's all for now, A lot of people want to animate stuff, so I hope this diary can be helpful to some of you. What I have learned so far is that when you are just starting is extremely important to stick to the basic methods, don't go trying to animate everything at once, you will go crazy haha! Try to find a method that you feel comfortable with, whether is making the poses first, animating each part and etc. As you learn more about timing and keyframing you will naturally start to grow and become independent, but first as I said, be patient and try to nail the basics.

Thanks and keep rocking!