It’s still not easy to be creative.

So this is about animation.

I used to work as an animator in the beginning of my career, starting with Power Animator (which soon was to be replaced by A|W Maya) and giving up Max for LightWave 3D. Maybe weird, but I love simple programs that let you tinker.

Now, after about 6 years of working as a game designer, I started getting back into the puppet show.  It turned out that most Apps are still enourmously complex, come with way too many ways of doing one thing and require the animator to be highly skilled in technology and scripting.

Which isn’t really a problem, but just takes a lot of time. I spent all of July 21st working out the intricacies of references, Skeletons, Skins and IK driven animation, only to find that:

1. My mesh wasn’t ready yet (it usually isn’t)
2. My skeleton was partly wrong. Big mistake! Even If your mesh will change, make sure that your bones are up to the tasks. Otherwise, you will notice that:
3. using references i a nice way of keeping your files apart, but won’t save your animation if your skeletal data changes.

It was only yesterday that I had a nice chat to a professional animator at Sproing who told me about using two separate rigging and animation skeletons, and just linking the animation data to the rigging skeleton. Good idea! this requires a lot of ground work (he uses a MEL script that contains all hard-coded bones that are mapped) but really pays off. In the end, he merely runs the script (keeps one script for every character) and is ready to animate.

Neat.  Flexible. No data loss.

So before I had this talk, I spent 3 hours after midnight reading various websites, only to find that most contain the classic newbie questions.

So this hasn’t changed either :)