drumbeatoflife.com Blog

I am now in the process of retiming and adding breakdowns to the animation.  I have found tradigitools quite useful for this.

I’ve had to manually key every pose in Maya, cos I couldn’t get the animation out of MB onto the TSM2 rig - primarily cos I couldn’t get the rig hierarchy int MB. Oh well.

So, the slow progress continues. I’ve switched my pipeline to maya. Basically it’s because setting up facial animation in motionbuilder and with maya is just too finicky. I love the simple MB rigs. But I’ve found Anzovin The Setup Machine 2 a lot cooler! It’s a maya plugin for rigging that just works - automatic skinning and rigging. There is also The Face Machine which I will probably use for the facial animation.

Here’s a screen grab from Motionbuilder.

Compared to maya

So, it’s been four months, lots has happened. On the shorts front, I’ve been looking at a pipeline change. The setup Machine 2 for maya features in it and now I hope The face Machine for Maya will be ready soon too. Motionbuilder timing is near complete, so I can get on with all the anticipation, follow through, holds etc.

Ah, ticking away in the background, I’ve finished the major blocking for Guhdum. Here are the thumbnail drawings I used to guide me.

I’ve missed my once per week target already - but only because I’m laying down my keyframes on Duhdum.  I’m about halfway through and there just isn’t anything to show, but there will be soon enough.

A little more progress modelling background props. It’s slow going thanks to day to day life.

I’m leaning more and more to rendering in blender. I figure I could possibly use mdd import to get animation from maya (actual animation in motionbuilder) back to Blender.

Here’s a link to a thread on blenderartists.org . It looks promising, after finishing with props, I’ll do some experiments.

Just thought I’d post a wireframe of the layout scene below

Shot at 2007-10-05

I have started working on the environment and will take this opportunity to introduce my second character Guhdum ( screen left)- ”Guhdum is a lean magical african drum. Although quite talented he is quite insecure and prone to moping about.”
He clearly needs a lot of work for completion - but that’s the fun part

Been messing around on the Duhdum poses, and I’ve done some thumbnails :