I am feeling better this week. After screwing up my blocking completly, I finally got to understand what animation is about.

This is a splined version of my failed blocking with some parts done with the new workflow. I have to put more breakdowns on the end bit and blend the poses a bit better on the jump sequence.

I am having a good time animating in Max but in 2 weeks it is time to go back to Maya in order to use the rig provided by the school (more later). Hopefully by then a new release on Maya with a 21st century arc tracker will come out ;-).

September is coming, I can’t hold my guns anymore and decided to splash out all my savings in what will allow me to achieve great work. I therefore bought a new Wacom Intuos3 for which I completly customized the “ExpressKeys”. I am able to animate entirely from the tablet. The “Expresskeys” have been remapped to do CTRL, ALT, Shift, Alt+W, open the Graph editor, go full screen, and navigate frame by frame using the slider. This is just heaven! The tablet will also help me to give life to my models using Zbrush and some fancy software just about to be released 😉

Last but not least, I have also decided to replace my Sempron 2.6Ghz with a decent processor in the shape of the new Intel Dual Core 2, due to come out this week. I have set my eyes on the 6600 for about £220 this is not cheap but reading several reviews and benchmarks… THIS IS A KICK ASS PROCESSOR!!!! 😉 I will also have to buy a new Mobo and some ram but the upgrade of my machine was long overdue.

What else… I am working on a new website www.monza-interiors.com the backend is pretty much finished with some fancy php/mysql oh I should actually give a link to this website we did a while ago. www.stagknight.com we got really disapointed when we saw the trailer and I am not sure we will ever see the colour of the money we were promised… Anyway the website is nice, only frontend stuff in flash.