The Ident Project

Ok so the ident project went reasonable well. I decided that I would do my ident totally in Maya, so I set myself quite a big task as we only had 4 weeks to do it in. My idea was to have a jungle character walk on to the scene as if he were hunting something, he would hear something in the bushes , cut them down and discover a TV with the OSTN channel on, and of course do a happy dance. I wanted my animation to be very bright and colourful and I started out by looking and the Papua New Guinea tribes and the colours decorations they used. Now when designing my character I did have to overcome a few challenges as I wanted my character to be quite funny, but not be discriminative against another race or culture. So after a few tweaks here and there I had my final design which I was happy with. Next thing was the animatic which I think looks fine but did make me worry about the time and whether 10sec would be enough.

Well with that done I really needed to get started on modelling my character in Maya, as now I only had three weeks left. The modelling when quite well and I think I am getting better and quicker at it , but I did use too much detail and could of cut down on this quite a bit, but still happy with how it looked. Next was texturing which again went fine, I did a small difficulty in texturing subdivs but after a bit of reading up on it was able to overcome this.

Now for rigging my character, I had not ever rigged a full character before so I did have to learn as I went. I discovered Maya's full body ik which worked really well I think. Then I did a smooth skin and painted my weights so I didn’t have any funny deformations, which takes up so much time but again something I had not done before. Now I can move onto my animation with five days left to work on it, well I wish. As soon as I started animating I found my characters fingers were growing as I went along, so I had obviously done something wrong but I have no idea what. I did see on one of the forums that another girl had the same problem when using the full body ik but had no reply on how to fix it. So I was running out of time and really needed to get my character working. I tried several different things but ended up deleting the emitters in my characters hand which seemed to work although it not right way to fix the problem, it just meant had to use forward kinematics on the fingers which was fine with me. By the way all of this took up two days so now I only had three days left to animate, render, and edit my animation. So at this point really stressed about time, went on to animating. The animation all went fine, really like using the fbik rig although again had to learn it as I went along. I also used ncloth on my characters skirt which I really liked using and was the first time I had used it but a really great tool. Ok next was rendering which is always really time consuming but went ok except on my last scene where my machine decided to take two hours to render 8 frames which is just wrong. So had to move on to a different machine which worked a lot faster but not fast enough and I wasn’t able to get the project in on time, but I did eventually finish and I am quite happy with how it turned out.

It’s not perfect and I thing maybe it’s a bit much to fit in 10 sec, I had to cut it down quite a bit and the ident logo on the TV screen isn’t to clear. But I am really glad I attempted it in Maya as I have learnt a lot and hopefully I will find it allot easier on the next project.