Did a little more work on my character puppets. I've attempted to clean up the poor quality image on the front-facing head, but I think it's a lost cause. I mirrored the eye and cleaned up the whites a little bit which I definitely think helped but I reckon it's better just to get some new pictures. Something closer up (in better lighting conditions and a decent camera) with bigger eyes in order to help show expression would be good. Ideally I'd like to be able to take the eyebrows and have them on a separate layer so they'll be easier to animate. Perhaps I could even erase them and draw them back in?
Also made a rear facing puppet which I feel looks a bit shoddy. I'm fairly happy with the body, I think it's just the heads on all of the puppets that are bothering me. I'm seeing Craig again this week so hopefully I'll be able to get some better pictures for the head...
I wanted to see how well the puppets worked with the puppet tool and decided to just play around and see what happens. It came out horrendously. I kind of wanted to see if I could do a curtain-closing-type action, but the arm movement is too slow (easily fixed by adjusting keyframes) and the hands need to be changed as well, so they look like they're actually grasping the curtains. I need to try and work out how to replace them with a new image.
Granted, I didn't spend very much time on it, but the puppet tool is just so heinously difficult to work with. I'm doubtful that I'll really be able to put it to any use. I really can't get to grips with the way it works — the movement is very limited. Ideally I'd like to use it just for the legs to give them a sort of 'rubber hose' effect like in the British Gas adverts, but it'd be pretty pointless seeing as you don't see my character's legs for half of it. I think it would just be easier to split my puppet into layers and animate them manually, using anchor points and rotation keyframes. Still, I won't discard the idea completely and I'll certainly keep playing around with it.
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