Help! I have to animate!

Hello! This week has been pretty good! I started off Monday by finalizing my concepts...

I spent about a day to come up with a concept for the Cheshire cat but sadly we won't be including him in our level. Apparently the judging panel made pretty clear that they wanted the games to be as close to the original book as possible. This means no Cheshire cat and no Jabberwocky.

I guess that's what happens in the industry all the time. Ideas are being created and then replaced by new, better ones.

I also did a few NPCs concepts just in case we have time to create them. It'll be nice to see some sort of population in the level considering it's Oxford city.

Well, so far so good...or so I thought...

Most of this week I've focused on the real life rabbit. Modelling was pretty straight forward. I kept it fairly low poly because it will be pretty small compared to everything else.

Then I took it into Zbrush and added fur detail as well as tweaking the overall shape. I made it more round and thinner. At this point I realised that my original model was too low poly to animate properly so I used Zbrush to do a slightly higher poly version.

And then I found out that I've probably chosen the most difficult task in my group...

I used CAT rig instead of a normal biped rig because it gives you so much freedom in terms of transforming, adding and deleting bones.

I have never used this 3DSmax feature therefore I am relying on tutorials to help me through this process.

My current work is to read how to use the CAT animation tools and there's so much to learn! I have spent most of today reading tutorials and I felt like my brain could not think straight by the time I went home. The fact that barely anyone knows about animation in the course leaves me on my own for this...

I understand the basics but then there are so many little details and layers and functions that I don't even know if they apply to what I want to do that it just drives me crazy.

Anyway, I am happy to be doing this. It's something new and if I succeed, it will make our level stand out from the rest.

This is it for today, see you soon!