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Leaf Bug - Animation

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Alright, so the facts remain that I will not be able to finish this animation anytime soon. I slapped on a surprise improvised ending, which I thought up on Monday. I am NOT the best piano performer, so my half-improvised music on different tracks is only on average par to what it could be if I had the time to write out the score and get professional musicians to blast it out (harp, piano, classical guitar, english horn, clarinet, and flute), and the music was limited by my own abilities. I only had one night to work on this. If I had the time to do it again, I'd spend a week practicing the parts, or just taking many many more takes till it was perfect.

Let's see... the original storyboard is here: [link] I had to cut it short because of time issues and getting this in for the animation show. What I'm submitting here is unfinished, because it's not rendered, but I'm not really sure if I WANT to render the rest of it because there are SO many issues with this animation that are just so unforgiveably bad, and I had a LOT of trouble with paintweights. I really need to paintweight the entire thing again because I had deleted some geometry after I had bound the skin and painted the weights, and it just messed up all my paintweights if I tried to edit them. (Paintweights, for those who don't know, basically are weighted influence assignments to each joint/bone in the object's skeleton. Note how the skirt is ultimate fail).

Other than the technical issues, I have some animation issues that I would also like to disclaim. I only had one week to animate and render this, so I whipped it out super quickly and it became more of an animatic-ish animation than anything. I still like my Squirrels animation better.

I still like the idea behind my story, and it disappoints me that I was unable to make the deadline, and it's gotten to the point I'm just plain sick of this for now, so I'd like to take a break from it, and maybe one day get back to it just to fix up some stuff, work more oon the bushes, etc etc. I like the look of the limited palette. And the end, which was slapped on last-minute, actually is pretty nice too. I think for my next animation, I'd like to forego the entire texture process and do toon shaded characters with painted backgrounds.

This is the reason why I haven't been doing fan art lately. I am glad that summer is finally here!! God, I feel free already,a nd I still have one more day of school to go <3

Okay, so you know, there are SUPPOSED to be flowers growing in the scene. That's why it's slow motion when she waves her hand. I didnt have time to draw nice textured floers and have them grow for her. Too much effort. Too little stamina. God I'm just done with this. Gimme back my squirrels. I loved them!

--

I'm going to be swiping my hard drive and reinstalling programs (including CS3 again, sigh, I hope it goes ok) because I'm graduating and I'm going to lose access to my programs in 3 months. I may as well swipe it now and get Microsoft Word from the school for free so I don't have to worry about getting a crack for it and other programs I can have and not have to worry about downloading. But because of the swipe, I'm also going to have to re-set my project files and that will take an entire day in itself. Argh. So yeah, I may as well submit this now and have you enjoy it.

Other than the obvious flaws in it, for all it's worth, I'm still happy with this. If I make a demo reel including it though, I'm going to have to reanimate it. At most, I think I'll repaintweight her and just pose her for a few prettily rendered shots to add to my portfolio.

And as for the leaf bug... I want a plushie of it. Seriously.

Thank you *nekoni for voicing the squirrels again for me.

I did the music for this piece. Everything is (c) me.
Image size
720x480px 62.27 MB
© 2008 - 2024 lauraneato
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SuperBrownMan's avatar
I enjoyed it! what else can i say? :)