Stewie times two
well i started out strong this week for the third week of work on the stewie or in my case olga personality walks. i had only lost one day of working due to the july the 4th holiday so i thought i was off to a better start than last week losing 3 days to the dreaded toilet clogging demon. i had rightfully decided to start over with the new version of stewie since the squash and stretch arms on v 1 were broken and i couldn't get olga to look like the sexy russian spy she is, she was instead looking like a sexy ape, not so bad but not so good.i added high heels to the new stewie and began re posing using the old model as a template. i tried and i tried all night and day but just couldn't get the new poses to have the same ooph as the original ones. i wonder if this happens to other artists, i mean i know it happens to me with painting sometimes where i try to recreate soemthing i've done before and it never has the same fire as the original first time i did it. i didn't know it was this way with animation as well, you'd think since there are clear numerical values you would be able to recreate the poses from scratch again.
that's when i decided i needed old stewie back, well at least the keyframes. if i couldn't get the keyframes onto the new stewie w high heels then i would have to fix the squash and stretch arms on the first verion and continue w that one. since i had no idea how to do either of these things, trying and failing for hours on my own, i contacted my mentor Derek Freisenborg, and emailed the AM super support team. i got some sugestions but couldn't seem to make it work, perhaps my total lack of technical knowledge in maya was getting in my way. hmm.
then i remembered, the FORUMS! thank godness for those forums because they have so many useful ideas for just about anything. i check in a bunch of different forums not expecting to find anything then found a link that Brad Bradbury had added that led to another secret forum. in it was all about transfering animation from the old version to the new. Aja B had suggested the most simple way to do this was to just copy the keyframes in the timeline of one controller and paste them into the new controller. it worked! and it didn't take too long. not all the poses came back out perfect but i got the main areas to look right and i can tweak the rest on the brand new stewie whose armsn aren't broken. yay!
and i finally figured out how i broke the squash and stretch to begin with. i compared the 2 rigs and noticed that i must have deleted a set driven key ages ago when we weren't even working on the arms and never noticed it til it was too late.
o well, so i made some headway in the wrong direction, back tracked and now i'm moving forward again, and such is the journey of animation....
posted by anthea @ 10:36 AM
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