Plushy Knight Opening Sequences - Almost Done!

...Phew. Facial animation for the 3 scenes are done. Not complete of course, but given my time constraits, i really ought to move on. I've still got cloth to do for two characters and all...

Seeing this all together now makes me think i might need to change the camera shots on that last scene...

Anyway! I've learned something today. The difference between straight forward animation and pose to pose. For the longest time I never really understood the point of straight ahead animation, and that;s because I've always animated using passes and then going back through and adjusting timing and the poses themselves as I animated. But when it comes to facial animation, going through with passes makes the process more tedious than it would be. Especially when it comes to lip syncing, it's just far easier to forget the frame count and focus purely on hitting the expression and mouth shapes on the first go. I'm not sure what it is, but the way the face and the body moves, how they move and the kinds of motions they make, are distinct. Might be because of the fact that the body uses muscles to move bones whereas the face uses muscle to move skin. Who knows.

Of course, that said, a part of me isn't too fond of straight ahead animating. Because it's like taking a drawing and starting with the upper corner and just drawing EVERYTHING. No sketch, no gesture, just jump right into the detail. Sometimes it'll look good, sometimes it won't, and it's just harder to pick up on exactly why something doesn't look right.

All my own thoughts just from reading up on a chapter on pose to pose vs straight ahead animation in a How to Cheat in Maya book. Which I'll need to get myself one of these days...