Poo-Poo Platter

Wow, a whole week since my last post. It’s been pretty hectic for me lately as I’ve been putting in some extra hours at work and keeping busy with other stuff. I haven’t touched the horse animations since last week, but I will get back to them in a couple of days. Hopefully, I’ll be able to wrap up the last of animations in next week or so, and Robert can officially ship the Horse Content Pack.

This weekend, I’ve been busy working on some short character animations. A local game development studio contacted me last Monday, told me they were looking to hire an animator, and said they liked what they saw on my site. They’ve asked me to do some test animations for them, so they can “get a better sense of what I am capable of”. If what I submit matches their requirements, they’ll call me in for an in-person interview.

I’m using a character that they’ve provided, and everything is done in Maya. I won’t go into the specifics of what the character and animations are, but I will say that it is a human character, and the animations are pretty typical of most character-based adventure games. The animations aren’t terribly difficult, but they do take time to finish.

The animations need to be submitted on Monday, so I don’t have a whole lot of time left. I wasn’t able to do much work on them during the week due to sheer exhaustion from full-time work. All I was really able to do was look at the rig, get a feel for how the controls are set up, and plan out how I want to do the animations. I was able to spend most of Saturday actually animating, and I’ll have all day Sunday to finish them off.

I was really caught off guard by these animation tests. This type of thing is actually an unusual thing for me, because a) this is only the second animation test I’ve ever had to do (the first being the Godzilla animations for Pipeworks way back when), and b) I haven’t used Maya to animate anything in months. I’ve been using Max for production work almost exclusively since April of last year. The only Maya-related work I’ve done in the last year is infrequent updates to the Maya2DTS Online Reference and tiny things here and there for the Garage Games community. Needless to say, it took some time to reset my brain for Maya mode.

Despite the short time-frame to complete the animations and the workflow adjustment, thing are going pretty well. I have the hardest of the animations pretty close to done. It just needs a clean-up/polish pass to get it as close to perfect as I have time for. The other two animations shouldn’t be too difficult to finish off on Sunday. I’m in major crunch mode, but I’m happy that I’m animating.