CT5ANIGP - Character Performance Animation

University of Portsmouth - Animation Yr. 2 - Animation Group Project

Animating the performance proved to be very tedious, due to all the issues that I ran into. 

Because the rigs were old, and had so many nodes that weren't present in the newer versions of Maya, they were crashing each time I was trying to play the animation. Optimizing the scene proved to be useless. I also have tried saving the scenes as Maya ASCII, but I couldn't figure out how to delete the faulty code. Without any other solution available, I had to send the rigs to my tutor. All these problems have delayed me by almost two weeks, putting me in a very difficult situation. 

Initially I wanted to have a fixed camera, to capture the whole performance of the characters, but because of the shortened time period in which I had to finish the film, I decided to work 'economically' and change the camera angles strategically.

When I finally started animating with the fixed rigs, I noticed that the preview was lagging, and the IKs weren't working properly for Mery. At first I blocked in the main poses and carried on, and started animating Malcom, while 'hiding' the other character. 

Because Mery wasn't working properly I decided to search for answers online. The problem was that the Evaluation mode, in the Animation settings menu,  was set to Parallel, and the rig required it to be set to DG. DG did fix my rig, but the preview became so laggy that it couldn't be used. So from that point on, I had to animate Mery by playblasting each time I wanted to see a preview. 

The following video shows the development of the animation: