Further Progress With Animating

After getting the majority of my scenes animated, the three I had left to complete were all focused on my character. For all of these scenes the movements were quite repetitive, and only focused on the chest upwards of the mermaid, so luckily I didn't have to spend long amounts of time trying to move the whole body, like I did with the swimming scene!


At this point, there was still no colour or texture on my mermaid, so she still looks quite dead in the eyes, because..well, you cant see the emotion in them. This is all something I had planned to incorporate after the animation stage was complete, but before rendering.

Problems I came across

• When animating the arms, and after talking to Ollie about his experience with animating my character, it became apparent that they weights I had painted on the model were not all 100% accurate. There were some small areas that were influenced by certain movements which didn't look right. 
• Also, because these shots of the mermaid were quite close up, I didn't worry too much about where I placed her, however this meant I would need to figure out the positioning for the lighting so it wouldn't look as though it is constantly going from light to dark!
• Some of the movements were just a little too slow or too fast.

How I solved these

• Luckily, the majority of the mermaid's body is in the water, and not completely visible for these scenes, so I didn't need to worry about going back and re-painting the weights. If the problematic areas were noticeable, then I would have had to go back and do this.  However, I wanted to be realistic with myself and my time, as well as my partner's. 
• For these scenes, I will need to spend some time making sure the lighting looks consistent by moving it around and doing some render tests!
• For the adjustments to the movement, I kept referring to the Graph Editor where I could simply move the key frames across forwards or backwards with in the time frame.