Session 106 .. Overlap and FK pain

What an exhaustive week !
This week we had to study overlap. I thought I knew what that principle is.. but I was So wrong !! There is lot more to it than meets the eye. Its really difficult to attain it and make it believable.

Now, I had this crazy Pendulum rig from AM which we had to animate. This time we got a picklist of two levels of difficulty for animation. I chose the more difficult one and tried to be creative. I thought of showing some figure 8 curves on the pendulum's motion.
Believing that it was easy to get it was really insane. I had under-estimated the challenge!
Heres the plan I had..

Isnt it cool ? Yeah, there was a surprise ahead for me..

Now after I was done getting really cool figure 8 curves on the general motion of the pendulum, I found something was making all the motion look haywire. After a lot of fooling around with the rig, I found that the rig was in FK and not IK ! I had to modify the rig or do it in FK. Doing it in FK was going to be a lot of pain .. but after talking to some peers and AM support I got to know that the Rig was purposely setup that way to get us used to animate with FKs.
Maaaan, counter-animating a FK setup can be such a pain ! I spent all of my week making the rig what I wanted to do and not what the computer wanted to do.

Heres the goody.. all done and ready to be pulled apart at my Mentor's e-Critique..



So I learnt many new things this week at AM..
1. OVERLAP !!
2. Counter-animating in FK
3. NEVER under-estimate any kind of assignment. You never know how it can be demanding.

Now I think I know what more to expect on this Crazy ride to being an animator.. Its definately is going to get even tougher..