The final update

The animation is finally done but with few issues. The increment saves for both mine and Steph's Morpheus rigs worked well with Callum and Ben's Norman rigs however we did have to do each shot one at a time, this would have been a massive problem so the renders were divided out between myself, Callum and Steph which cut the workload down a lot. As we separated the workload I will talk about the shots that I dealt with which were the 'panning running shot' and the 'kicking the front gate down' shot. Using the storyboard for reference I decided to use a panning camera to combine the first and second shots into one, cutting down the workload and render times further. The first problem was that each shot had to constructed each time. This caused a problem with Callum's rig rendering incorrectly as its right arm and leg were a strange cell shaded grey material that couldn't be changed. We traced the problem to the fact it was saved as and ASCII and not a Binary and we found that if the ASCII was opened in Maya and that had everything else imported into it then there would be no rendering issue. The second issue was not really a problem but more of an annoyance as I had to select all the controllers on the Morpheus rig so I could add them to a new layer then turn them invisible so they wouldn't render in the playblasts, I'll explain why we did a playblast a little later. The final major problem was the render time. Callum discovered that the render times would be an issue even though we were doing several scenes each, he also found that by editing the playblast settings the quality could be improved to the point of workable without sacrificing too much quality. This proved to be a good idea as once the controllers were hidden the playblasts look great and it allowed us to quickly see what issues were arising if any.
Something I kept forgetting were the character sets. While animating the camera I found that it would mess with the Norman rig by making the legs or arms clip through the rig in strange ways. After consulting Callum he found that while I was editing the trax editor to create a longer looping sprint animation I started animating the camera while I was still on the Norman character set. Once I switched back to No Character set I didn't have a further problem.
When I was animating a panning camera that spins round from the front to the back of the runners I came across a strange problem where not only would only one transformation would Key, for example the move transformation would key but the rotation wouldn't. This was fixed by simply restarting Maya and never came up again.

After all the scenes were rendered Callum began editing them and adding music and sound effects. After he was finished he showed us the finished product and overall I am quite pleased with our result given the problems we were having with the Trax editor and the fact we were using 2 different rigs which seemed to be incompatible. The playblast method of rendering the scenes did prove effective and once it was put together did look nice. On the animation side of things looking at my animations next to other ones from my group I do feel mine are lacking. I feel that my animations are at least passable but compared to others they look rather simplistic and not particularly good. This I think does let the group down a little and brings the quality of the final animation down as well however you can clearly understand what the animation is supposed to be so in that respect I think my contribution does its job just fine. However I still maintain my stance on animation. It really is not my strong point.

Another late update

So we haven't really been doing much animation for a while as sculpting and our racing project has sort of taken over, that and I do what I'm told so the planning has been down to Callum and he just tells me what animation he wants and I do it.

One problem we discovered is to do with the Trax editor. We needed to use this as our group has used different rigs and Callum discovered that the best way to get all rigs in and animated would be to use the trax editor. This proved to be a complete nightmare. Steph and I were using the Morpheus rig and Callum and Ben were using the Norman ones and only Steph and I were having problems. It seems that it is stupidly hard to tell what controllers have been selected on the Morpheus rig and that played havoc with the clips which took ages to figure out and then still didn't work. We took a whole day trying to figure out what was going wrong with my clips which we traced to the fact that I didn't select all the controllers because it's very hard to tell what has been selected on the Morpheus rig. After that I exported all the clips we needed and imported them onto a blank rig, aside from a few little problems everything looked good. So Callum took the rig back and tried to add it into the scene, this went so badly the whole plan was scrapped for the simple plan of importing the increment saves with the character sets attached and adding them into the required scenes which would then be rendered out. I was not the only one though as Steph's rig had the same problem. We really had no idea what was going on with it but the time constraints we decided to just go with the more reliable but slightly harder method to render it out.

Frankly I'm not entirely sure what is going on. I do what animations I am asked to do and leave the technical side and putting together to Callum, this is well out of my league and knowledge so I'm not really the person to ask.

Long time updating

So it has been quite a while but I have been doing animation and only now have I gotten around to playblasts but I put them in a super convenient playlist on the Tube of You the link to which is below

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10ypErJlfww&index=1&list=PLzPeD4L6bI9JqxHLk7FJXUxA8z5KNbo6L

Bit late

So it's better late than never right?

Well I have been creating several animations, all of which are finished but need polish. I currently have a walking, running, sitting and panting animation.

Currently however the walk and the run cycles are being re animated to look half decent