The Cowboy WIP has been dwelling uninvited in the back of my mind. In contrast to my Dana and Clara work, it has not come easy to me at all, and it’s apparent in the much lower quality of work comparatively to the standard I’ve been recently holding myself to. As it stands right now, it doesn’t deserve a place in my showreel, and I don’t want to turn in work that I’m not proud of. I don’t know why I thought it would be easy, perhaps because it’s a “simple walk cycle”, but it’s been fraught with constant frustration, not entirely due to the fact that it involves both a quadruped and a bipedal character moving simultaneously.
Before I begin, I will just remind the reader of my intention here. This animation is the exaggerated, cartoonish counterpart to what will be a hyper-realistic animation featuring a much more intimidating character.
Anyway, my initial issue with the cartoon cowboy shot was a question of how to parent the hands. I intended to have the cowboy’s left hand stay placed upon his belt- as I had planned in my reference footage- but, still having yet to fully embrace the functions of working in FK, I wasn’t sure how to accomplish this, and was frustrated by the mesh deforming when I placed the hands in IK, due to the fact that both were parented to moving objects (the hip and the horse). Luke helped me find the answer to this.
In the same vein as parenting the hands, I had taken the rigged hat from another character and given it to this one, and I struggled to figure out a way to parent it to the head and animate it, yet allow him to take it off later. I tried baking the animation and working against the parent constraint, but ultimately my solution was to duplicate the mesh and toggle visibility- there are actually two hats. I’m not altogether happy with this, though, because it’s messy and because I would prefer to be able to animate the second hat as well.
In addition, I can barely even begin to get into the struggle that was trying to get this onto the render farm about two weeks ago. I’m not sure why, but the frames 34, 148, and 181 (oh my god I have them memorized) repeatedly failed to render correctly on the farm, rendering the perspective camera rather than the tracked footage. I tried rendering the EXRs manually and replacing them, I tried duplicating the camera and rendering the specific frames with that one instead, I tried parenting a separate camera. The most baffling part of it was when I finally got those frames correct and instead 33, 147, and 180 failed. As I pushed through this, I also worked to get my Nuke composition done right, having only used it a few times (though more and more frequently as of late). In the end, though, it wasn’t Nuke that was giving me trouble, even with the complicated file pathing that fills me with anxiety, it was just Maya and its inexplicable failure to render those frames. Shamefully, my solution was finally just to duplicate the frames before each failed one and replace them. It’s not really a solution so much as it is avoiding the issue, but the animation itself needs work and thus is going to need to be re-rendered at some point anyway.
Another huge, overarching struggle, the biggest one you might say, is twofold. Part of this is animating the horse in a way that looks real while of course not having access to reference footage the specifically works for what I’ve planned. I’m working mainly from a muscular diagram, which can only do so much for me. After asking for feedback from multiple animators I’ve gotten the horse animation to a place that isn’t abysmal, but it could be better. The second issue is being unsure where to draw the line in exaggerating the cowboy movement. What is “dramatic” and what just reads as a mistake? I feel that because I’ve been staring at it for so long, it’s hard for me to tell.
I will get help from Luke on this one shortly. It is embarrassing to show work that isn’t good, even if that’s the point of asking for help on it.