Battleplan

I've figured out I might as well come up with a plan for how much work I'm going to put into this thing. My experience in the military taught me the value of a tight schedule. There's no way around it - this project is huge, and thinking about it as a whole is overwhelming and it's certainly not the way to go. I have to break it down into little pieces, and tackle each at a time, while maintaining some kind of a notion of how the project moves on as a whole.

Since I have 4 free days a week, I've decided to approach this filmaking process like a regular 9:00 - 18:00 job. During the full days, I'll wake up early, get dressed, clean up the office (my room), sit down and work for 9 hours, including a one hour lunch break. It's not that bad really - that's hopefully what I'll be doing anyway for the next, oh, 40 years? Might as well get used to it. So far it's been 2 days, and it's really not as easy as I'd thought. There are many annoying things in the process, which still require a lot of thought, and knowledge in maya. Sitting down for 8 hours when you're not really sure what to do can be aggitating.

Anyway, enough blabbering. Homie's face is nearly complete. I started playing with it and it feels very nice and fast - and it really looks like something I would draw. I set myself up by trying to make a pixar level facial system. Now that I'm done I realize pixar-level is nearly impossible for one person to create - they have so much control a good animator can really work all the nuances and enhance the character. I think I've got the basics down, but sometimes when I was playing with it, I felt I wanted to tweak the eyes just a tiny bit, and the mouth - just an extra level of tweaking would have made my character more unique. No, but I'm really happy, it looks exactly like I wanted it to look. I tamed maya, and made a really playable and fun rig.

Here's homie at his current stage. Note that there aren't any deformers yet, so he's very..... vertical... But u can see the potential right?