As well as processing through the ATD – CFX apprenticeships, I also want to work on some personal projects that I’ve had in mind and try to create something that reflects on my current stage of learning and development as a CFX apprentice.
One of the projects that I would like to tackle is rigging and creating controls suitable for production. A lot of the attention can be drawn particularly from the way a character’s facial expressions and hand gestures that when it seems odd it disrupts the suspension of disbelief. Hands are important aspects when it comes to expressing emotions and a character’s personality. There are plenty of opportunities to look into building a rig system that an animator can use to help provide support the flow of the animators’ work.
Hand Rigging (Ongoing)
At the moment I am learning to rig in Maya which is something that I’ve felt uncomfortable and would try to avoid at any cost! But I told myself that in order to grow and become better at your craft you have to do the uncomfortable. I decided to rig hands simply because it’s more focused on a certain body part rather than tackling the whole human body which can seem overwhelming to wrap your head around at the beginning. Therefore in the next 8 weeks (setting myself a deadline so I can commit to it) I will hopefully get to a stage where I am more confident in creating a hand rig that I can be proud of sharing.
PLAN OF ACTION
I plan to work on this project for 8 weeks. From the research and development stage, (modelling?), rigging, skinning and creating range of motion animation tests.
Feathers Groom and Simulation (Started)
For this project I have set off to learn more about feathers and how to approach the workflow from grooming and simulating feathers. It is of the more challenging aspects in the CFX pipeline which I’d like to tackle and work towards improving my knowledge upon simply because there’s very few feather systems that work to fix the interpenetration between feathers.
PLAN OF ACTION
This project is a little bit more ambitious since I have very little experience with feather systems in general and I’m still fairly new with Houdini. I plan to tackle this project straight after the hand rigging. And an ongoing research and development will still take place as a move through my apprenticeship
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