For the last few months I've been plugging away at my computer trying to prise the door open on a few projects I have. It started again when I picked up an old character I made - my oldest one as it turns out - and did some work on him to bring him up to a more animation ready state. I textured him with Substance Painter, a new piece of software I bought recently, and gave him a groom (hair!) in another software. And, when I saw a rendered image of him, I realised there was a good opportunity sitting and waiting to be opened. really had to do something with him. So, I turned my attention to figuring out how I could animate him.
I thrashed about various ideas, but I kept coming back to a tool I had made previously to help me translate motion capture data onto any character rig. The tool is called ProxyMan and you can find more about him on his project page here.
I got a reasonable way through development, but never really finished it. Just other things happened and, well, time got away a bit. It never fully worked for various reasons. But having a few projects now sitting in the wing relying on something like this, I need to find a solution.
Coming back to this after time away really helped put into perspective what I needed to do with it. The change in approach led me to pulling out a fair bit of code, redesigning the core structure and how it all operates. I've completely changed the underlying data structures.
It's actually been a fair amount of work - and it's still not working!
I have all this code, a bunch of cool character models - fully rigged and ready to go - some really good film cameras and camera gear, and some other good software there as well to support making small time productions. And I still feel I have nothing to show for it.
But I think this is about to change. The updated ProxyMan is becoming a much better programmed tool. One that is already more stable, with better data structures and just better under-the-hood coding. There's a still a couple of things that need tidying up, but the rest is just making the motion capture mapping engine work. Then, I should be able to get a simple animation out with it.
It's been a really long journey - over many years - and I'm still agonisingly short of being able to show something. I'm frustrated. Really frustrated. But I think something could just be around the corner. And, I'm ahead of my schedule for the time I put aside to redevelop it. I wanted to get something working by Christmas, and as it stands, I've got about a month to work on the engine part of it now. If I can achieve this, and just break out with a simple walk cycle animation or something like that, it might be enough for me to take things further in the new year.
Frustrated, by excited.