The First Short...

Well, okay. It wasn’t exactly designed to be 'a short' and it hardly amounts to much. I just fiddled with the footage from an exercise in using normal maps.

The footage is the first animation I’ve done with the new Miliband body after I ditched the previous effort yesterday afternoon. It’s been another hard lesson learned: you can’t simply design a character and expect it to rig well without careful planning. I begin to see why animations often have such stylised characters with thin arms and legs, far bodies... This time, I created a body whose arms and legs aren't going to get tangled and are separated from the main body by a good amount. It’s probably a good thing. I should start to think about the style of these animated characters and stop giving them typical human proportions. I’ve also gone back to using a single mesh for the body. I read on the web that other people have trouble with clothes overlapping and there’s no simple solution except to try to make everything a single mesh where possible. So bang goes my hope to have one body I could keep reusing, simply layering clothes over it.

Now the Miliband is finished, I really want to get back to work on the longer animation I’ve been working on for weeks. My second big lesson is to get animations right before I render them. The above has too many little problems caused because I didn’t do a quick test before I rendered. I’m beginning to learn that there’s a limit to how much stuff you can fix with video editing software. I just wish my PC wasn’t struggling so much…