Scene 21 Changes

Today has been aimed at working on my final scene. The reason I had left it so long was to see whether another group member could fix the Mongolian’s arm which had for no reason disconnected from the rest of the rig. Unfotunately it could not be resolved so I had to import another Mongolian and copy across the keyframes. I decided to use a newer version of the Mongol rig as I believed Tara had done them better, but I actually found them to be worse as he gets random creases in his arms and there is a difficulty with rotating the hands at times.

Furthermore the new rig does not rotate at the torso which I feel has been some what detrimental to my Mongol walk cycle as he approaches the Marmot as he moves at the hips but then the arms are also back at the shoulders when they are meant to be opposite and forward. I am unsure if there will be a blur on the Mongol at this time, which will be down to the compositing, so it may be alright in this state for the film production. For my personal work, I will look back into rigging to add another controller to move the torso, probably by making it twist the two top clusters within the chest.

It also became a bit confusing when I copied the keys across as the new rig was in exactly the same place as the old one and I could not differentiate between the two. This meant taking a step back and keying the appendages –arms, legs, etc – first and then the overall control for the character. I did become somewhat concerned when the eyes appeared in this state as I thought they were randomly floating out of the new geometry for no reason. Happily, I found they belonged to the old one and could be deleted accordingly.

One of the other changes I had to change straight away was importing the changed version of the chicken into the scene and making the Marmot dance with it instead. This was relatively easy to recreate the movement of the chicken yet there was more time spent moving the arms of the Marmot to make it look like he is holding it, as the mass of the chicken was not the same as the old one.

I am also unhappy with the movement of the Marmot now since I have had to cut his spin, as throwing the chicken in the air again looks like he is giving it to the Mongolian and obviously we do not want this to be the case. I would like to add in another dance move after the side step yet I will think about this after the Mongolian’s moves.