Opening a fresh can of rage.

Good - for a month of work, this contract will pay more than my Patreon brings in in a year.

Bad - pretty much everything else about the job.

As we get closer to the end of the month, I may just turn off billing.  This job has left me with no free time so far, and I've been filled with rage nearly 24-7.

Day one on this job was spent finding a workaround for the client's rig.  The IK controls for the character's feet were created at an angle, which...  the best way I can describe why this is bad, is that if I grab the hand and move it straight up, technically the control is moving in two directions instead of just one.  That would make it unnecessarily difficult to animate.  Fixing it wouldn't have taken much effort, but I wasn't allowed to fix it, so I needed to come up with a bolt-on solution.

Animation-wise, each scene has four characters. It's the same model for each one, and they can share animations, but those animations need to be offset so they're not all moving in sync with one another. Where this gets annoying, is Maya doesn't make it easy to copy animation from one character to another - I've had to do it one control at a time, which gets tedious when there are four characters.

The latest animation I've been working on took 3 days just to block in, and still needs to be refined. The biggest challenge with this one is that it involves a large piece of rope that one of the characters needs to guide down onto the ground, after which it is used as a sling, and has to whip around before settling back into its start position. All of which needed to be animated by hand, with no dynamics.  It took me a whole day to find a solution that would let me animate it without going insane, but it still got my blood boiling and made me unpleasant to be around. At every turn, I've felt like I'm being punished for other peoples' incompetence.

As I type this, I have 7 days left to finish two animation sets. I'm tired, miserable, and haven't had a chance to relax in two weeks. And even once these two sets are finished, there's still another set after them, just with a more relaxed deadline.  And after that, they may have more work for me a couple of weeks later. I'll probably be stuck spending those weeks writing some new tools to make my job easier.

The money may be nice, but I hope this game bombs and the studio is forced to shut down.