sally animation tests

We got the sally rig yay =D and as i have been assigned animation director before me and jen started animating the shots that contained only sally in i needed to make some test animations. This is so that when we started animating both of us had an idea of how sally would move. Then with the actual shots in the film the animation would flow and the viewer hopefully won't be able to tell a difference between who has been animating what.  

With Sally's personality we need to show her cute and playful side so with the walk i tried to make it bouncy. One of the problems with spiders is that people are freaked out by the way they move so i tried to make her not scary in her movements which i think works with this test walk. sally's walk was a challenge as the swaying i gave her made her look like she was strutting or a gangster which wasn't what i wanted but think it worked out alright in the end.

I then went on to making test animations of sally pushing and pulling something. The push test i kept simple and she reminded me of a puppy while animating it as i gave her a bit of a bum wiggle before she went to push. I think this shows she has a playful personality.

I really enjoyed animating the pull test as i played around a bit more and i like the part where sally pulls the key and the first look at the key shows her interest. However i wasn't happy with bits of the animation like the second look at the key at the beginning didn't really work for me but didn't really know what to add either which was annoying. Also after showing the tests at the production meeting they commented on how sally rubbing her hands in preparation to pull the key doesn't really come across and that her personality doesn't really show very clearly in this animation. Which i completely agree with and if i had more time i would of liked to alter it but it is still a good reference for how sally would pull something and the comments are really helpful for when we work on the actual animation. I really enjoyed animating these tests specially as have been excited to play with the rig and has been quite a while since i have been animating. I was impressed with the sally rig as well as dan is learning as he has been rigging the character and she was very easy to use and there wasn't that many problems with her that needed fixing which was great =D.

Spider clips

As me and jenny will be animating sally soon YAY!!!!! we decided to look up clips of spiders movements to help us. Georg had given us a video of the spider animation and heres a clip 

i remembered watching this episode when i was little and still remembered the tune haha =D the spider in this animation uses exaggerated comic movements which show his character very well. I think this style of movements would work really well for sally. I then tried to think of other animations that used spiders to get different ideas of styles of movement and thought James and the Giant Peach!!! which i haven't seen for ages and really want to watch now!! and heres a clip i found of some test animations of Miss Spider

Completely different style of movement compared with the previous animation as well as being stop motion the movements are less comical and she walks more lady like...... in a spider way =D I then tried to think of a 3D animation with a spider and could only think of Charlotte's web and heres the trailer and skip to 1:10 to see the spider

Her movements are more realistic. I think that sally would work well with more comic movements seen in the first animation but perhaps a little bit more realistic in movement.

and finally here is some footage of a real life spider

cuckcoo clock animated

textured environment

The environment is now pretty much textured well done to harriet =)

unfortunately we have had a few issues as one the render time was taking a very long time and one of the reasons Pete found out was that our textures were very big in file size!! so me and jenny had to resize all of the textures.....but now the render time has been decreased because of this so its all goood =D

another problem we've found is that when me and jenny check the textures on our own computers for one of us there might not be a texture but for the other there is.....which makes no sense sometimes but ah wells!! worked around it as i have now checked and changed issues with the environment and hopefully it will be okay now (fingers crossed) and here are some renders. It does have lighting added by pete in the renders but this isn't the final lighting but gives an idea.