Len’s WIP

More timing-tweaking.

I’m breathing a huge sigh of relief. After relearning the basics of LightWave’s expression editor, I was able to come up with an okay solution for the treads. In a nutshell, LightWave expressions are mathematical formulas that create animation relationships between two or more objects. Here’s a simple example of this formula:
[len.wink] x 1 = […]

So I spent what little spare time I had last week refining and cleaning up the legs. I can keep on modeling details without actually getting any work done so I stopped myself. Last Friday I decided to take on the tank treads. I want to do something similar to what I did before: animate […]

It was only recently that archaeologists realized that a bowl they discovered in the 1970s from the “Burnt City” contains the world’s oldest animation. Prickly animators continue to debate this claim, since it does not properly utilize the principles of animation such as squash-and-stretch, overlap, or weight.

Giving up is not an option:

So I made a separate IK rig, tested it, and decided not to use it for the transformation. After taking a break and watching Shooter, I decided to use FK, which means I’d have to move all the joints of a chain individually instead of using one IK handle to control the chain. I’ll still […]

I spent much of last Saturday re-rigging this thing. I gave him a real basic skeleton with the intention to use IK (non-CGer definition: create control handles that can move multiple joints instead of moving the joints individually). Then I gave him weight maps to assign which bone controls what. Then the frustration came in. […]

This was a project I had for school back in 2003. It was for my texture & lighting class, then I used it for my compositing class. Ever since last year’s Transformers movie and this G1 video found here, my interest for robots, machines, and other mechanical moving parts rekindled. I decided to go back […]