Problems so far....

Things to consider for my next animation:


1st problem- Can not add face rig

I now realise that instead of smoothing the geometry the way that I did, I should have smoothed the normals in the same way as my friend at uni has and her models look just as smooth. This would have reduced the poly count by alot on my scenes and by adding the body and epesecially the face rig has added even more impact on the size as the character to start with was high poly. I also found that although I used a rigging machine it was actually quicker when I created my own rigs in my last project and I had alot more skin weights to change than I thought. For my last project I used blend shapes to create the face expressions but this time I used the TFM (the face machine) giving me better quality expressions and a wider range whereas with blend shapes although you can create various face expressions you are still limited to the control of it. So what I was after was the results that you can achieve by using TFM.

Problem solved- Bought a new and faster computer :)



Problem 2- problem whilst testing out the characers rigs

Now that I had bought my new computer adding the face machine was not a problem but then I came across another problem... with the rig :/ Whilst adding the face machine you have to define the body parts, I defined the tongue as part of the main rig, I'm not sure whether its the fact that my tongue was seperate from the body or not but when moving the geometry from it's origin and rotated it, the tongue would move out of the mesh , instead I unparented the tongue from the rig and then parented the tongue to the jaw bone, once tested it was fine :)


Problem 3- creating my topiary hedging

After looking at tutorials I still couldn't find a way of creating the hedge so that it looks like leaves close up. I experimented on Maya rooting through the menu's and I resolved the problem by creating paint effects and then transfered them tothe polygon mesh.... it works and looks fine but it does make the scene heavyier so I may have to reduce the amount of footballer topiary.


Problem 4 -scenes are very heavy

I have had to go back to every element in my scene to make sure that it has no history on it, which also means going back to my scenes and re-importing the objects. I have to minimize what goes on the scene which isn't what I want really but I will find a way of making it work...it's just a very long process. For some reason my scenes were taking about half an hour to load and about 20 minutes just to save.... so I'm working on this at the moment. my advise would be to keep to low poly objects if you can and keep checking that there is no history being transfered inbetween scenes.