Stone age - animation progress

Before doing any animation on this, I keyed an animatic camera and a proxy of my character moving around, so I get my timing,positioning and scale right.



Why not directly animate the global control of your character move and do it on a proxy instead? Well, duh- have you tried keying a character that constantly moves?

The second thing I did was writing a rough draft of all the movement of my characters - when do those cycles start and end...



Aand after doing that, I came up with even more jokes and funny little moments that you wouldn't see in my early animatic, making this even a bigger task than it already is.

I have to say that I really am loving maya's keyframing ability and all the little controls that the system will let me create for my characters.



I have gotten roughly 40% of the animation done (in the first week). It's faster/easier than I originally thought it would be. I found some annoyances in my character sets- mostly the skinning and the lack of squash and stretch, which wouldnt let me do some of the things that I would like to do to my characters.I also had to create some extra props and controls for them as well...fix a constrain mistake I made on the spear xD..
I am learning a lot right now, while having fun.




It's interesting what one man can do in a bit more than a month. Animatic and a story, 2 animatable characters- with textures and everything, backgrounds,props with their controls and almost half of the animation is done. And I am only learning Maya. Imagine after I get some more experience.This is my first 3d animation after all.