Responsive: Completeing the Storyboard

Now that I had my chosen idea in mind, I decided to refine it and jot down exactly what was going to happen before I considered shot framing and generally making the storyboard. The final idea was;

- Dig is looking around for something to do.
- He finds Lulu sitting with her bowl of blood and some bones. He wants to eat to so tries to get her to give him some food.
- Lulu looks at the bag of treats and ignores Dig.
- Dig tries to pester Lulu into giving him some treats.
- Lulu finally gives in a throws Dig a couple of treats. They land circling a bin.
- Dig runs over to eat the treats, but because they don't get digested they land back on the floor intact. He keeps circling the bin eating the same treats over and over again.
- Lulu laughs, and Dig finally realises what he is doing, and licks ("kisses") Lulu for laughing at him.


The entries were going to judged on five main criteria (as well as the submission form answers that we also had to send in alongside our final products); Originality, Creativity, Characters, Story, Structure.
In my eyes I thought this was going to be a good submission. As far as I am aware the idea hadn't been used before and accuretly portrayed the character's personalities. I had used 4 props (with the limit being 5) and even though it was suggested that one or two would be plenty, I still feel that the story is very character driven. Two of the props (the bin and the dumpster) had only been used to drive the movements of the characters. The bin was there as something for Dig to circle around, and Lulu was sat on the dumpster to stop Dig from immediately getting to the bones and enabling him to jump up at her.

Because I was happy with the idea I got started on producing the storyboard. I started by drawing out the different panels in my sketchbook, with the intention of transfering them to a storyboard template.

Sketchbook Pages

Although the brief said that we were not going to be judged on our ability to draw, I thought it would be best to give my storyboard some colour. I thought this would help my storyboard stand out and failing this it would still give me practice at working with Photoshop. So that's what I went ahead and did. Once I was finished I uploaded the images to a storyboard template we were instructed to submit, and added the finishing touches and directions. Once I had done this and filled out my submission form, I was ready to submit my entry. I had shown a couple of my peers my entry and they seemed to like it/not have any problems with it, so I sent it off. 

Selection From My Storyboard Entry

Fingers crossed!

Email Response

Update: I have since received an email that stated that my entry was not selected for the short list. I got a bit excited when I realised I had an email from the CBBC as I didn't think they'd email me to say I'd been unsuccessful, so I was a little let down when I realised that I had been. I wasn't really expecting to be successful with my entry as I felt rushed to finish it and send it off, but it definitely would have been nice considering I'm actually fond of my final colour panels. Still, I have learned from the experience.

Responsive: Brainstorming Ideas for Scream Street

To get started with planning, I made a note of all the important information I was going to need, and made a collection of the reference images that were going to be useful to me. This included the characters that were going to be involved and the setting.

Dig and Lulu

The Scream Street Set

 

The brief also outlined that we were limited to what sets and props will be available, so we were given a list of props that we would be able to use in our stories but we were only allowed up to five. This was to challenge us into creating a more character driven piece. I made note of these and was focusing upon them to come up with the basis of my narrative.

 Collection of Props Available to Use

Selection of Ideas and Notes

The prop that stood out most to me to begin with was the skateboard. I was thinking that because Dig likes to play games he could try to get Lulu to join in with some sort of activity. He could have dug a hole (which he enjoys doing) and tried to 'jump' over it on the skateboard, but kept on failing, resulting in Lulu simply laughing at him. I was thinking that he could also build/put together a ramp using different objects/materials, for instance leaning a plank of wood up against a tipped over bin, but because I wasn't sure whether I'd be allowed to implement a plank of wood into my story I decided to scrap this idea, as there wasn't anything else that could be used a ramp. 

In the end the idea I wanted to develop, played on the fact that Dig doesn't digest things, instead it just passes through him considering he is half dead. I was going to have Lulu throw Dig some of his bones/dog treats and because he doesn't digest anything, have him circle around an object repeatedly eating the same few bones without realising it.

Responsive: Individual Practice

A week or so ago, our class was presented with a new brief for the responsive module. The brief outlined that we were to identify and respond to a number of different competition briefs that reflect our creative interests. We have quite a while to complete the brief (until April, so 7 months) but I thought it would be best to spread out my work load and partake in a few competitions now, so I don't have to leave everything until last minute when I may have a lot more on my plate.

I scanned through a couple of briefs and one that immediately caught my eye was the BBC's Scream Street Animation Short competition. The brief required me to either produce a 10-20 panel storyboard or a 45-60 second animatic that outlined a narrative for two of the show's characters, Dig the dog and Lulu the leech.

Snippet of the Brief 

 

 If I am to be successful with my application, I will be invited to go to the studios in Manchester (Factory) and work with their mentors to see my ideas come to life in animation. This is the part that stood out to me the most. I am interested in creating animations for an age range of 6-12 like the brief outlined, but it is this opportunity that made me very eager to compete. I am yet to experience working in industry and it is something that I have wanted to experience for a while, especially as it is something I am strongly considering pursuing as a career (working at a company with a team of animators).

The only downside to this brief was that the deadline was the 30th October, and I had only found out about it on the 25th. I still thought this was do-able, and said to myself if I could come up with a good enough idea I would push myself to get it finished within 5 days.

Telling Tales: Interim Crit.

In order to prepare for our presentation for the interim crit, we decided that I should be in charge of putting together the power point, whilst Emma got to work on our animatic, which is exactly what we did. As we had already discussed the timings for each of the scenes in our storyboard, all Emma had to do was refine the images. Whilst Emma was doing this I was scanning in all of our work up to date and forming a presentation that we would be able to present to the class.

Our Animatic

 Our Presentation Slides

I feel the presentation went well, a lot better than some of the presentations I've given before. Maybe it's due to the fact I was stood at the front with someone else, but I'd like to think it's because I've gotten more confident with presenting, but who knows. We were able to assign each other slides to talk about fairly without one of us taking charge and stealing what each other had to say. The only thing that I would like to work on is how quickly I talk when I'm nervous or when I'm excited about the conversation topic. I tend to trip over my words a lot and not think about how I can form sentences as I'm speaking. I would also like to cut down on the amount of times I say "erm" or "like" in my sentences. It's an awful habit I have picked up and I'm trying my best to work on these issues whilst I'm speaking.

But enough about that/me.

Our ideas seemed to be received well and we managed to get a lot of good feedback and ideas for improvement with the main points arising from the setting. There were a lot of suggestions about experimenting with colour in either the background or with some of the objects in the room, just because it feels more eerie/scary than it does friendly, and the addition of a pastel colour might help create the ambience we are looking for. It was also suggested that we look into the furniture we choose to model and feature in the room, as it might be a nice touch to have children's toys scattered around the floor. This would make the scene more realistic and would also give a sense for where the floor is, considering the space at the moment seems infinite.

The next major point was the character design. It was pointed out to us that we need to focus on the scale and proportions of the child and parent before we begin modelling. This was a fair point and was something we had actually already considered, but just wasn't portrayed well in the presentation. I had simply but the designs side by side at similar sizes so the designs could be easily seen by our audience, and was not to reflect size or scale. Having said this, I shall look further into the body proportions of the child and think about maybe making his/her head and eyes larger to more closely represent a child, etc.

All the points raised were valid, and are going to be things that we consider and explore before we move further with our project, in particular our modelling. They shouldn't take too long to sort out so we should be able to start modelling this week (fingers crossed). It was also nice to hear that Mat thinks we are working well as a team, and that we have been able to adapt to each other's styles, especially as we were having a few issues as the project was starting out in terms of communication.

Character and Narrative: Creating Constraints and Connecting Controllers

The next step from making controls was to set up constraints between the joints and our created orient groups. From here we could parent the controller to the orient group for every single controller so when we connected them to their respectful joints this would allow us to control them using the controllers we had created. This process was quite tedious (as is most things in the field of animation, it seems there is no escaping these repetitive jobs) as I had to repeat the same process over and over for each joint. However I seemed to get through the task rather easily.

Or so I thought.

I must have gone wrong along the way, as when I came to apply an orient constraint to the controller and joint in the next step, my head tilted like so:

Maya Issue

It turns out I must have froze the transformations on my orient groups, making them orientate around world coordinates, rather than the local ones of the group I had parented my joints to. I was instead supposed to freeze transformations on the CONTROL rather than the group. To fix my problem I would have had to go back and un-parent all of my orient groups and control handles so that there was no longer a hierarchy that I had created in the previous tutorial, and repeat the process making sure not to freeze the transformation of the groups.

Look at ALL Those Scene Files

I was lucky enough to have created a separate save file for each step, so rather than doing that I simply reloaded from my last 'checkpoint' as it were, and started the process again. This was quite painful to have to do, but I made sure this time around that I had the right component selected each time I froze the transformation, and I was able to get to where I needed to be.

Working Constraints and Controllers

When I was completing the next video tutorial where I was shown how to make the controllers effect the joints I made sure to double check that each controller was working before I moved on to the next in hopes that I wouldn't have to repeat any processes. I am quite glad that I have encountered a problem as it did make me think on what went wrong and how I could have solved the problem, so in the future if this happens (hopefully it won't) I won't panic as I will know what needs to be done.

Now all that's left is to bind and get this bad boy finished off.

Telling Tales: Considering Environment

We were already aware that we were wanting to have the story take place in a living room as we felt that this was the most realistic setting, but we didn't know what we were wanting the living room to look like. We knew we definitely needed at least one sofa as the child was going to interact with it, but the rest of the room's furniture was still undecided, so we got to work at making some sketches.

Environment Design 

Emma's Thumbnails

We really liked the designs we were able to come up with, but discussing it further we came to the conclusion that the complexity of the environment might draw attention away from the characters, which we want to be the main focus of the animation. Instead we have decided we are going to take an "Pocoyo approach" for our setting, which is a very simplistic white background, with the odd prop. 

Here I have made an example environment of what the setting could look like in maya. 

Before "Whiter Than White" Settings Were Introduced 

 

Example Settings

We feel that producing a setting in this way is going to be much more beneficial to us, as it will draw the attention towards our characters. It will also make the skin of the 'Giraffelope' stand out from the background and the colours (white and yellow tones) will compliment each other nicely to make the animation feel more friendly and loving, which will in turn compliment the theme well. We're not going to go much further with this design, we may experiment/explore further the objects we would like to feature in the room (For example, a coffee table that the parent character could place their book on at the start of the animation) but we are definitely not going to go much more complex than this. We are going to keep detail to a minium with the environment. Not only will this benefit our characters, but by doing this we have the potential to reduce rendering time as the setting will be very basic. This could in turn give us more time to focus on animating the characters or post-production.

Character and Narrative: Potential of 3D Modelling Continued

With the use of 3D software it is possible to create extremely realistic films, a common way of doing so is by using Computer Generated Imagery, most commonly known as CGI. CGI refers to any visual image whether this be static or moving that has been created using computers, which could refer to characters, scenery or visual effects, for example.

CGI Explosion in Iron Man

CGI can be extremely useful for filmmakers. It is often the case that some shots or scenes can only be generated on a computer due to the impracticality of creating the effect in real life, whether this be because the subject doesn't exist (for example the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park) or whether it is because of the cost of production would be too high. CGI is also much safer than generating some real life effects, a good example of this being explosions. It would take a number of attempts to film an explosion just right, so not only would CGI be more cost effective in this scenario, it also doesn't put anyone at danger.

When CGI first came about, the difference between life action/real life characters and those that had been computer generated was very obvious, but now with the advance of technology we are able to produce much more realistic effects, to the extent where it can be difficult to distinguish between what is real and what isn't.

Bill Nighy as Davy Jones in The Pirates of the Caribbean

I believe Pirates of the Caribbean to be a fantastic example of where CGI has been used. Here it IS obvious where some CGI has been used (Davy Jones and his crew being a good example) but because it has been used so effectively the characters don't feel out of place. Instead they feel as though they are real-life characters as they fit so seamlessly with the other actors, when in fact Bill Nighy was filmed acting among other actors in grey pajamas with reference dots attached, so 'Davy' could be generated in post-production. This method allowed for the other actors to produce a better performance as they were still able to interact with Davy/Bill (and vice versa) but also gave the animators a highly detailed reference to work from which was definitely going to be beneficial, especially that they had to animate 46 writhing tentacles in his beard.

Telling Tales: Making a Decision on Characters

Me and Emma have recently sat down and had a discussion about which characters we wanted to go with. We decided that we wanted to go with an animal character, and more precisely focused on deers and giraffes as we like the tall slim figure that they have. We also thought that a child deer/giraffe would look more appealing struggling to walk as they are generally quite clumsy animals. So we whipped up a few designs.

Deer Design 

We couldn't decide on which we liked better. We liked the interesting design of the deer and it's antlers, but we liked the pattern on the skin of the giraffe, so we had the ingenious idea to combine the two animals into a Giraffelope.

 

Giraffelope Design

Having decided on the character design we made start on making T-poses of the characters so we could use them as image planes when it came to modelling. I got Emma to create her T-pose first so I could base the shape and style of my character on her's. Here is the result.

 

Character T-Pose

Now that we've got our characters sorted I feel much more comfortable with the progress of our project. Now all that we've got left to consider is our environments and sound design before we can get started with modelling and animating.

Character and Narrative: Creating Controls

Another session, another hand full of video tutorials. This time we were shown how to create the controls for our character, which was a relatively easy process once I had learnt how to do it. All I had to do was click Create - NURBS Primitives - Circle, and line up each created circle with the joint I was wanting to be able to control with it. I could also use the CV Curve tool to create different shapes to be used as controls, which is what I did for the eyebrows, eyes, clavicle, shoulders, feet and the "master control". Once I had done this I colour coordinated my controls so that they would be easier to use by going into the attributes for each component and going to drawing override.

Completed Controls

List of Controls and Creating IK Handles

This task didn't take long at all, it was simply a matter of creating the central controls and ones on the right hand side (or left hand side) and mirroring them. The most time consuming part was actually colouring the controls as I had to do this individually and it was rather tedious. I did however learn that it was important to snap the anchor point to the joint that I was wanting to control (which was also easiest to do once all of the controls had been created) and that it was also important to freeze transformations once I was finished, as this would make it easier to return to this 'T' pose if need be and to keep track of my transformations when it comes to animating. 

Telling Tales: Storyboarding

Me and Emma finally sat down to get our idea storyboarded. We knew we wanted our story to be built up of a series of walking attempts by the child, but we didn't know how many we were going to be able to fit into a minute, and at what camera angle we were going to show each attempt. In an attempt to work out the timings for each walk/stumble, I searched for reference material on YouTube of children learning to walk. I looked for small clips of how we could have the child move and timed how long they lasted as a basis for our timing planning. We started with the first and end scene as these we essential to the story and then estimated how many walking attempts we would be able to fit inbetween.

Storyboard (Actually Scanned In, Too!)

We also discussed briefly what character design we would like to go with. We decided that we are going to stay clear of robot designs, as we feel that a squishy character or one that is based on an animal is going to be 'cuter', giving the animation a more loving and heartwarming feel. With this decided we are going to design more animal characters before we come to a final decision.

Character and Narrative: Creating a Skeleton

Creating the skeleton was surprisingly quite a quick process, and I managed to get my skeleton completed in less than an hour. I guess it's down to this process being relatively simple, I just need to remember to;

- Make sure to create joints in either Front, Side or Top view rather than perspective
- When moving individual joints, hold 'D' so the children joints aren't effected
- Remember to rename joints so it's easy to locate them later
- Make sure every joint it parented correctly
- Remember to make a Hip Dislocate and Clavicle joint

Completed Skeleton

Again, I'm very happy with my progress and it's exciting to see that my model is nearing completion. Now all that's left to do is set up all the controls and bindings, and then we will be good to finish off the model. 

Let's go. 

Telling Tales: Lecture on Character and Short Story Design

On Monday I attended a lecture given by Sara Barbas on Character and Short Story design, which I found to be very interesting. She told us some of the key elements when it comes to character design and things we should consider when we designing ourselves.

The first point Sara raised was to write/study the story, as the character should always serve the story. In order to do this, research and references maybe necessary to ensure a successful design. Not only this, but life drawing is very important as it allows you to study movement more accurately which is just one of the things we need to consider when we design a character. The other three main considerations are target audience, final platform and genre.

When designing characters we were also instructed to consider the "core shape" of our design, as different shapes can often represent different characteristics or personalities, with the three main shapes being squares, circles and triangles.  Circles tends to be associated with being quite friendly and cuddly, where as squares are seen to be more masculine and strong. Angular characters can often be seen as threatening, or feminine if the angles are more curvy, but if the character is made up of a mix of different core shapes this could mean that the character is more complex.

Circle Characters

Square Characters

Angular Characters

Mixed Characters

I was also reminded that asymmetry can help to give a character more life. When a character is drawn perfectly symmetrical it can make them seem more "wooden", which is something I'm very guilty of when it comes to character design, especially when I don't necessarily draw the character in a pose. I tried to bare this in mind - as well as all of the other points that were mentioned in the lecture - when I continued to work on the designs for my current project. I found that it definitely helped/improved my drawings when I wasn't focusing on making the character perfect in terms of giving it life, so I shall have to continue to try and work with this mind set.

We also ran through the key elements of a short story, and to summarise these were;

- Short story should be predominantly character driven. Make sure to introduce the characters straight away.

- The urgent goal or plot needs to be introduced quick. There isn't much time for background story or character development.

- 'Tools' that work well are to play with conventions, props & setting, sound design and a story twist, loop or gag of some kind. 

- You don't have to "spoon feed" the audience, meaning you are allowed to leave room for the viewers own interpretation.

Example Short - Oktapodi 

I found that these pointers were really useful, and I hadn't thought about short stories this way before. It only really became apparently to me just how much these tools and guidelines were used when we were shown a couple of example shorts. I'll definitely be referring back to my notes when it's time to storyboard!

Telling Tales: Character Designing

Once I had finished my mood-board of character research, I got started on some more designs for our models. I continued with the idea that they could be robots (an idea I like the sound of as I feel it would be considerably easy to make them move, considering they are made up of parts, yet still look interesting and detailed) and here are some of my results.

Robot Designs

I was happy with how the robots were looking, but I had the idea that the characters could be based on animals, considering we weren't wanting to make human characters. So I decided to explore this idea a little further to see what I could create.

Animal Designs

I'm really fond of the Giraffes. I think they look quite lovable/dopey and I like that they're a bit different by standing on just the two legs instead of four, giving them human qualities. I feel like they wouldn't be too hard to animate either, as the body is a simple shape and is quite similar to that of our practice model. However, I'm going to report back to Emma to see what she has been doing with her designs and show her mine, so we can make a decision on what we would like to model.

Character and Narrative: UV Mapping

Today's studio session was incredibly useful/helpful. In previous sessions we had been taught how to locate the UV map of the prctice model and how to upload our own textures, but today we were shown how create our own UV maps for the models we have been creating with the help of Mat's video tutorials.

Initial UV Map 

When I first opened the UV Texture Editor for my model, I became very scared. The complexity of the lines made me feel that the task ahead was going to be extremely complicated, but once I had realised what I had to do it actually felt very simple. In order to make comprehensible shapes out of all these lines, I had to cut UV edges from my 3D model. I figured it would be easiest to cut the model into different limbs and components (for instance, the leg, the foot, the arm then the hand, etc.) and selected all the edges of each component that I wanted to make a cut of. Once I had done this I made an additional cut into the created shells so that when the shapes were unfolded they would lay flat, and to do this I made a cut down the legs and arms, through the feet and hands and one more cut through the head. 

Rearranged UV Map

 

I used the Unfold3D tool to unfold all of my shells, which created nice shapes. The only issue from here was that they over-lapped and weren't positioned in a way that would make sense to anybody. To overcome this issue I simply repositioned all the components so that they fit into the UV map and in a way that made it easy to understand what shape was what part of the body.

Example of UV Map in Use 

I found that this task was relatively easy to do as I was able to wrap my head around what edges needed to be UV cut in order to make shells that would be easy to work with. I found that the cuts I made were similar to that of the seams in clothes. I shall bear this in mind when I come to UV mapping future models, and we shall see how it goes.

Character and Narrative: Potential of 3D Modelling

Not everything about Maya is so negative, despite what my previous posts may have suggested, and not all animations produced using 3D software is uncanny. Infact there are many examples of animated films using these methods that have been incredibly successful. A good example is Avatar.

Theatrical Poster

Avatar was directed, written and produced by James Cameron and it was released in 2009. The estimated cost of the film was around $300-500 million, but it was worth the time and money as it was a huge success. The film received many positive reviews and also broke several box office records during it's theatrical run, becoming the highest-grossing film of all time. Avatar also won three Acedemy Awards including Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography and Best Visual Effects.

Though the film was not produced completely in Maya as that would have been very impractical (also due to the film having a mixture of acting and Computer-Generated Imagery), Maya certainly played a huge role. Performances that were made by live actors were applied to digital ones, where the digital characters were seen within virtual environments which had been prebuilt in Maya, which was also used for final scene creation and finishing. Nolan Murtha, the digital effects supervisor at Lightstorm Entertainment, stated "what we were able to do with the Autodesk software is to make technology an enabler and we were able to do a movie that we could not otherwise do."

Character and Narrative: Limitiations of 3D Modelling Continued

Drawing from my previous post that outlined that file size and cost can be a limitation of 3D Modelling, time can also be a major limitation. Firstly, not only can the training be costly, but it is going to be very time consuming to actually learn all there is to know about Maya. There is so much you can do with the program, from modelling simple shapes and characters to special effects and the knowledge on how to do this isn't just going to come over night.
Many people have the misconception that Maya would be quicker to make animations in, as you can worry about things like camera angles once the scene has created, unlike in traditional 2D animation, where you have to draw from the chosen perspective/angle. Where as this is partially true, it does not mean that this will decrease the production time. The length of time in which it will take to complete animations will depend on many factors such as the production team size and the skill level of the artists, just to name a couple, but this will obviously be the case for all creative projects.

In fact, sometimes the production time can be increased dramatically if the creatives are not careful due to technology malfunctions. Refering to my previous points, work can sometimes be lost if the computers that the work is being produced on can not handle the program. But even expensive equipment can fail, and it's very easy to lose work that has not be recently saved or backed up. This can result in having to re-animate scenes, and in worst case senarios, having to start from scratch. At least with tradition 2D animation you will always have your original frames to fall back to if post-production fails. When/if this happens, not only will it cost the company/creative time to get back on track, but it can also be quite costly (not to mention very, very frustrating).

Character and Narrative: Modelling Skills Continued

The next step towards completing my model was the hand. I came to create the hand, but the video tutorial had not yet been uploaded, but rather than wasting my time by sitting around doing nothing (and most likely playing some games) waiting for it to become available, I thought I'd give it a go on my own.

I had a general idea of how I was going to execute this. I figured the process was going to be similar of making the leg, in the sense that I would extend the border edges at the end of the arm to make the general shape for the hand, then cut out faces to extrude the remaining edges to create the thumb and fingers.

 

First Attempt at a Hand

I was able to make a general shape that resembled that of a hand (well, at least a alien hand) but I wasn't quite happy with it. I had considered the shape of the palm and I think I was able to shape this part rather well, but it was the fingers and thumbs that I was unhappy with. I liked that they were round in shape, but other than this there wasn't much more to them, for instance there was no knuckle definition. I also didn't like how the thumb seemed to stick out of the side of the hand, rather than having a joint towards the bottom of the palm.

I also didn't realise until it was a bit too late, but I had been modelling my hand in smooth view, so when I converted back to normal, the hand looked very odd and I was even more unhappy with the shape.

 

Hand in Normal View

The fact that I had been working in this mode would explain a lot of problems I was having during modelling. The main one being when I was trying to extrude edges, I found that other edge loops would move too rather than just the one edge. I realised this was due to the object being smoothed as edges were being moved, and on the whole it would have been much easier and less time consuming to work in normal view. I shall definitely do this in the future, and make tweaks in smooth view if needed afterwards. 

I saved my attempt, loaded my last save and started modelling the hand from scratch but this time using the video tutorial. I found that the way Mat was modelling the hand in the tutorial was much easier and produced a greater final product. I'm glad I was able to try on my own though as it made me realise the easier way of producing some of the features, especially the thumb. Mat had only extended a select number of the edges at the wrist to extend, meaning the thumb could have joints that were closer to the palm.

Second Attempt at a Hand

 

Hand in Normal View

I also realised the importance of having just the right amount of geometry. In my original model I hadn't taken into consideration the extra geometry I might have need to include around the joints and knuckles. By adding these extra edge loops it makes it a lot easier to reposition the fingers and thumbs. 

Looking back, I think I would have liked to also make the palm just that little bit wider/longer, just because it is looking a little small in these images. Having said this I am very pleased with how this has gone and is a much better attempt. 

Finished Model

Overall I'm very happy (and a bit surprised) that I have been able to recreate the model, and quite accurately if I do say so. I have faced a view problems along the way, but I'd like to think I'll be able to avoid these for future projects, where I'm going to be more educated on how to use the tools. Now that it's all done I'm looking forward to see how it will be rigged, so I can get started on apply my knowledge to my own characters.