Group dynamics

After a lot of prep work I've begun the process of animation...Yay!!!
(Above is Justin's first pose that I worked on yesterday)

Lets recap on what has occurred to this point:

The problem of the IK/FK switch that stopped working when scaling Norman was fixed miraculously with the aid of Morgan Loomis (who wrote the script). Leif had me contact him, saying that he wasn't sure it could be fixed, but Morgan might be able to help. As doubtful as this made me that there was a solution, I pressed onward and contacted Morgan, who (again) miraculously, had a newer version of the script in which that problem has been fixed...so far so good.

My attempts at reskinning Norman are utter failures, as evidenced immediately upon posing Justin. (You can see the shoulder problems somewhat in the above image) I intend to go back and restore the skinning to the original settings. Along these lines, after having my first meeting with Hosenfeld today, he emphasized that I make sure not to push too much towards realism...stay stylized. With this in mind, I'm giving up trying to unify the arm and leg Geo...Justin will be puppet-like...perhaps I'll have holes in the knees or patches of different colors, but the simpler the geo the better.

Now, to what I am working on at the moment.

I have begun to create poses for Justin--attempting to put some timidity and childlike behavior into them...first I'm just trying to get the basic concept down, then I intend to go back and work on silhouettes and body arc lines. Below is one of the poses...



As is evident in the image, I'm beginning to get him to put together the pieces. As of yet I haven't decided when and where and how to constrain the pieces to his hands. However, I did decide to create a grouping system in the reference file so that there are nested groups for the putting together of the puzzle. I can animate the green piece alone until the orange piece gets slid into place. First off, to make sure that the green and orange piece lock solidly, I reset their translate and rotate to zero so they are at default position, where they are already together. Then, there is a group above orange and green that contains the two together. So I switch from animating them individually to the group above them. This group is then grouped with the blue piece to create a new set, and so on...giving me a tiered system to animate different groups for each phase of the puzzle. I haven't quite figured out how I will go about making sure the pieces don't jump around as I switch groups, but for the moment its a very helpful structure for blocking out the poses.