Mouth shapes DONE!

Wow.... that was quite a difficult task. This week I'll tie these babies to the control system, and hopefully begin working on brow shapes.

I feel like I need to reorgenize my thoughts. It all seems overwhelming all of a sudden. So there are a few notable things happening. Firstly, I made an investment today by buying an excellent automatic rigging plug-in called 'the Setup Machine', which might pay off. It has quite a few neat features like a very good auto weighting tool, as well as very advanced controls such as bendi arms and legs, and a fully deformable mesh. I don't think I'll be using the later for most of the film, but it's good to have for exreme poses.

I'm also trying to recruit people to my cause. Today I've shown my animatic to a very accomplished animator, Gavin, who teaches at animation mentor, and he gave me his personal email, in case I want his advice on ongoing animation. He has been mentoring me in Imageworks, and his remarks are always on the money. It's also good to establish this relationship in case I submit my reel to imageworks at the end of next year. Additionally, I've made a proposal to a very good animator I've met recently, who's also interning in Sony, Elliot Grossman, by asking him if he's willing to animate a dialogue scene or two, which could also be an addition to his reel by the end of next year. He seemed to like what I have in mind in terms of my character's setup (frankly, the way I see it, in a few weeks I'll have an excellent character with fun controls most animators dream of). I just don't want to end up with a rig that's too complicated. It sorta grows on me. I think that I'll have to decide what is absolutely essential to my character, and erase everything else. My main goal is to create a virtual puppet, and animating it should feel like you're manipulating it with your hands, which means I don't want almost any scrub ons, and the controls should be well defined (extra attributes locked and hidden and most keyable attributes would have limits).

Till next sunday I'm hoping to finish ALL the blendshapes, and, cross my fingers, THE ENTIRE FACIAL CONTROL SYSTEM. I would need some technical help from *ahem* ROB *ahem*

I think it's best if I really repress any thoughts of what comes after that. I felt really overwhelmed today, so many thoughts buzzing uncontrollably in my head about what it would be like next year. One small step at a time. When it's time to panic, I'll panic, but there's no point losing my head over it now. Good thing I have winter break to really really crank it up. Spring semester should be the last stretch - and it's therefor a good thing I'll only have 8 credits left by then, 4 of them are the actual project.

Right now I'm struggling with one thing. I still haven't figured out how to layer the deformations using a few blendshapes. If the head was only one object, that wouldn't be a problem. But I just don't know how to deal with the eyes, teeth, tongue and hair. Come to think of it, I have no idea how I'm gonna tackle hair altogether... YAAARGH.