Scene 1 playblast

The first scene was by far the most daunting scene due to the fact that it was the first one I was going to produce and it was equivalent to almost half the animation so it was by far the largest. The quality of animation would certainly increase from there after getting comfortable with the rigs and my workflow.

(see submission folder for playblast of scene 1)

First of all there was much demand for this scene due to the fact there are 4 characters in which there are 3 objects that are held and it all needed keying. I typically started by creating selection sets to make keying for each character neat and tidy instead of limbs going off on one randomly between action. I would start with the waist and animate up as the legs were Inverse Kinematics whereas the arms weren't, so if I wanted to slightly adjust the waist I would have to re-key the arms to avoid intersections. This shows my determination for efficiency to avoid any time spent re-keying limbs. I would then start on the wrists incorporating some follow through action. Then the fingers to animate their hands in a more believable way.

The last thing I would do is animate the face and eyes, this was because I already had the motion so I could solely focus on getting the facial expression right. 

To be perfectly honest it did throw me in at the deep end in terms of finding my rhythm so it benefited the rest of the project in that way.

One very strange thing that happened was that in viewport 2.0 (which is my preferred viewport renderer) when ever I scrubbed the timeline loads of geometry would disappear until I settled on a frame, so off course this would be the case, so changing the renderer caused the textures to not be accurate to what its like:

Lovely white cabinets... But in the viewport they are ugly panda coloured cabinets due to the renderer overriding the visible texture to be the specular map for some reason.

This made me realise that I should have really chopped the scene up into segments so I could do a clean export that might fix the problem.

Going back to my focus on efficiency, I was able to animate only the parts of the characters that were in frame, for example if someone's torso was in shot, their legs would be static, this saved me lots of time and kept things a little cleaner. The only downside was that sometimes it threw me off when a certain body part wasn't moving which made me conceive the animation as incomplete.