CAGD 493 Week 12 Reflection - Christopher Coombs

    Hello, and welcome back to my weekly blog! This is Christopher Coombs, and this week, now that I have finished my ATST's walk cycle, I've moved on to my next big project.  On Friday, I finally made a full recovery and am feeling a lot better regarding my health, and I managed to commit to a decent amount of work on it this week. Primarily, I was focused on getting my idea out there while it was still fresh, so I put together a rough blockout of how I wanted my story to play out with the new mystery character. 

Here is what I accomplished by the end of this week:

    As you can see, the mystery character that I've been talking about working with a few weeks back was Wall-E all along. This was a free Wall-E rig created by Steakosaurus back in 2012:

 What makes this particular rig so cool is all the small moving components it has that are quite accurate to the movie, such as Wall-E's ability to open up its frame to store away junk, the telescopic arms, and its binocular-bending eyes. It even has tank treads that move automatically when you translate or rotate the character. However,  given that it is such an old rig, I've still encountered plenty of problems with it. WALL-E's treads only seem to move when translated on the Z-axis, no matter what direction the character is facing. Sometimes these treads move in the wrong direction as well, as seen in part of my blockout. While I'd love to just avoid this issue entirely and move the treads manually, I've yet to find any way to do so via controllers or the channel box editor. Another glaring issue I've noticed was that the left arm was not attached to the rest of the body. I managed to remedy this issue by parenting it to the cog controller. The last issue I've encountered with this old rig is that, for whatever reason, the textures overlap each other depending on the angle you are looking at Wall-E from. Unfortunately, I don't think I'd be able to fix this error. Even so, I wanted to make the shot look pretty still, so I created a three-point lighting setup, turned on ambient occlusion, anti-aliasing, and shadows, just like I did for the walk cycle. As for the blockout itself, it's definitely a bit rough in a large sense due to the animation's overall length. The best way that I could possibly tackle this project is by working in increments. I also need to work on the timing a little more, particularly at the start of their interaction, the awkward pause, and then making Wall-E's getaway look speedier. By next week, I plan on ironing out that AT-ST's turnaround, seeing how far I can get with it. If I have the time, I'll refine the start of the Wall-E animation as well. Of course, depending on the feedback I receive this coming week, which, as always, is pretty useful, my priorities might change. Even if that is the case, I will definitely be working on this animation in segments. 

That's all for now! Thank you for reading my latest update reflecting on Week 12! I'll be sure to keep you up to date with how this new project is faring.

                                                                                                                - Christopher Coombs

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