News regarding Cat & Rat + Fools Gold Dog rig

As I stated in my last blog post, I have recently got work on two new projects in the past 2 days alone.  Unfortunately, also in that space of time, the Cat and Rat project that we have been working on for the past few months has now been shut down.  The reasons for this were that we had experienced too many technical issues over the second term and into the Easter Holidays, which severely hindered our productivity and creativity and caused a massive delay in our schedule by about 8 weeks.  These ranged from software failure to needing to redo certain tasks (sometimes more than twice) because they may have been left undone for too long.

After having a word with our tutors, they were very honest in telling us that we will not be able to complete this film in 7 weeks to a standard that industry would like and they stated that we had three options:

1.  either to have a massive (and rather unrealistic) turnaround in the space of a week
2. find other projects to work on and focus on creating work that displays our specialism(s)
3. use the models and rigs to create a much shorter and simpler piece of work that is to the point and displays each of our abilities

I am going with the second option anyway, as I already got some more rigging work and finally a huge chunk of Animation work which I had been longing for, so I can fill up the Animation folder of my portfolio and include more recent animation on my showreel.  So far, my Animation folder is the most important one out of my three folders as I am an Animator first and foremost, but as of yet, it is the smallest folder.  However, this term, I am expecting that to change and I am expecting to have a lot more focus on animation this term.

As for the group that I was working with on Cat and Rat, we have unanimously decided that although the "Legend of the Chinese Zodiac" concept has now been dissolved, we will remain together as a group and try to use the rigs and models that we built to create a shorter and snappier concept and build up our portfolios.

So far, I have been working on a rig for a dog character as part of the Fools Gold project.  The plan is that I build the skeleton, controls and drivers for the rig, whereas Richard will paint the weights.  Here is a demonstration of the skeleton rig.  At the moment, it is not bound to the dog model.