Self-Reflective-Journal: Week Eleven: 10/10/24

This week I continued to clean the body in graph editor. This week was especially nerve-wracking as I had eight days left to finish everything. I knew I'd have to stay in late to finish everything as I could only complete the work at university as all the plugins and files were at school. During Thursday's class, I got help with importing my image sequence in Maya. Dr Kennedy helped me export the video file as a JPEG image sequence using a certain name convention in Adobe After Effects. This was my main problem as before it wasn't showing up in Maya and not moving. Having to have no spaces in the title and make sure the hash​tags were the proper amount was something I didn't know I had to do to export an image sequence into Maya.

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I decided to stay in class till nine pm on Thursday. Finishing clean-up meant I could start on the props. Clean-up consisted of me looking at each face group separately and putting Dr Kennedy's feedback into use. In graph editor, I fixed the shapes of the eyes, mouth and brows and fixed clear timing issues in the curves.  

After cleanup, I imported my notepad and pencil into my main scene and positioned each item to the hands. For my notepad, I selected the wrist joint and parented the notepad to that controller. I then brought the pencil in and moved the controller by shift- ctrl right-clicking and making my control axis 'object mode' instead of gimbal mode. I then used the W key to move the controller to where the thumb and fingers will hold the pencil. After I started posing the fingers and pencil throughout the timeline to match with the reference body footage in a right-view orthographic perspective. This was a tedious process as small intricate poses were easy to miss. Trying to make the poses look as real and accurate as possible was nerve-wracking as I didn't want to miss anything even though at times I wished I could've had a clearer or closer view of the hands in motion, nevertheless, I continued to power through posing the hands and on my first frame on an animation layer. I then moved the clavicle and shoulder controller back to match the performance footage. For this week I didn't do that much body posing but did lots of prop and hand posing. I spent a lot of time this week making the pencil look like it was scribbling/writing words and trying to make all the angles right. At times it was frustrating to do as the geometry of the object would cross into other primitive shapes of the hand so moving it not to do that took a while. Also making the notepad face the right direction while not going into hand was tedious. 

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I decided to add the audio which was fairly straightforward. I imported miri_fred audio into the scene and right-click on the timeline and selected the box next to Fred and Miri audio and changed the offset to my assigned animation clip '1941'. With this done I could start putting more time into the body posing.