I’ve been working pretty constantly on my two big projects this week – pausing only to write my video newsletter – which of course arrived after a long delay with a very tight deadline.

It looks like I will be making the trilobite animation and that’s great news. It also seems the same people want to meet me in Mexico to talk about other possible projects – which would be great.

Elance
Having decided to use Elance for the first time to hire in people to help with my animation work – and having given a team in India the job of rigging some of my 3d characters, I got the finished rigs back this week.

They weren’t brilliant, I have to say. I did choose the cheapest people – which I guess says something - and the results were mixed. I don’t think they’d done much character rigging before.

Character rigging, by the way is adding animatable bones to a 3d person so that when you move their arms and legs, the right parts of the body bend. If you get it wrong, you get unlikely looking bends and tears and the character’s bodies go out of shape. This is what happened in this case – and if I’d been using them in the normal way, the results wouldn’t have been satisfactory. Fortunately, I’m only using the characters as silhouettes, so it doesn’t matter too much.

I’ll definitely use Elance again – it’s a good way to farm out work you can’t or don’t want to do – but you have to be careful about who you choose.

I think the main requirement – aside from an understanding of the task – is an understanding of English. You really need to be able to communicate complicated ideas when working on an animation projects – and that means a common language is a must.