As opposed to the Cowboy WIP, I’m very, very proud of Dana. She’s already my best work. Dana represents the stylistic and technical skills I’ve been picking up at my internship- learning to be comfortable with extreme squashing and stretching as well as implementing cartoonish effects in a way that’s both entertaining as well as continuing to make sense.
I love the Dana rig. I discovered it when reviewing portfolios while going through applications to hire onto my animation team last week, an animator had used Dana in a facial animation expressiveness test. I recognized her as being stylistically similar to the David rig, and when I found the creator I downloaded both her and Amy. Sure enough, Dana is a dream to work with. Every control allows deformation and has full options for stickiness, roll, etc. The fingers and face are rigged just perfectly. Although there isn’t phoneme availability, the quick expressions are wonderful, and using Studio Library I was able to build up a phoneme database for the lip sync within less than an hour.
I also did some re-texturing, of course.
But what I was most excited for and what I love most about the Dana rig is the numerous hair controls. as you can see from my work so far, I love animating Dana’s hair.
The character I’ve been animating in my internship is a raccoon with great ear controls, and one of my favorite tasks is to “add ear floppage”. I’m insistent that he needs to have “jelly ears”. This, when applied to Dana, is the jelly hair effect. I’ve in fact made Dana quite gelatinous in general.
I have very little setbacks to report here. I’ve been working with Dana for a little over a week and have almost completely finished animating her, running into absolutely zero issues. My animation workflow is just as it should be- I’m able to focus on questioning my stylistic elements without worrying too much about tech-related difficulties.
As far as questioning stylistic elements, I guess I will say that I may have gotten somewhat carried away during that “aww”. I know it’s a bit extreme, but I love that rubbery bounce so much, it would hurt to remove. Perhaps in juxtaposition with Carla it’ll be more acceptable. After all, this half of the project is not meant to explore realism.