Organising The Work Load!

Since Ollie needed to spend longer focusing on rigging his model, I began with the animating of my own character. By the time he was at the stage of being ready to animate, we looked over the animating I had already done and decided to split the work load by working on specific scenes and not characters, this meaning we would also need to be prepared to animate each other's character.




We decided to go through the animatic and note down the key scenes to then decide who would animate what. My final list of scenes to animate had quite a nice balance between the two characters so I was glad to get the chance to animate Ollie's robot too.



Passing on the work

Ollie and I spent some time arranging our files and created a specific shared project folder that we would both have and simply pass the individual scenes on to one another through this folder.

Ollie had created one "Ready Scene" which would be the starting point for the rest of the animating, to save time having to drop in the characters and position them accordingly every time.


Robot Time!

Apart from the two scenes that I had previously animated (Scenes 3 and 4) I decided to work through them in order so I could tick them off one by one.


The scenes in which I needed to animate Ollie's
character, he stays quite stationary, and the majority of the movement was in just the upper body, apart from the occasional movement of the feet and legs to show that this character is very uncomfortable.

Also, apart from the first scene where we see the camera pan slowly at quite a distance from the robot sat on the raft, these scenes all consist of quite close up shots with not a huge amount of camera movement, so the animating of these first few scenes wasn't too time consuming.







Problems 

Through out the process of animating this character, things went pretty smoothly, however there was a small problem with the eyes of the robot. I noticed that if the head was moved too far to one side, the eyes began to sink back into the head. After getting Ollie to take a look at his model, it seemed apparent that it was to do with the grouping of the eyes.

After both Ollie and I playing around, it seemed that the best thing to do was to not move the head too far in one direction (which wasn't a problem because apart from this one scene, there are no scenes where the robot's head turns with the camera staying at it's eye line)


How did we fix this one scene?

The movement of the head was only too far by a very small amount, so I simply pulled it back slightly, it didn't look any different, apart from the fact that the eyes no longer moved back into the head.