Maya Animation

For this exercise we had to animate three bouncing balls, a soccer ball, a ping pong ball, and a bowling ball. This gave us a chance to really explore different weights and how this affects the way in which you animate an object. So first off I started with the soccer ball, which has a medium weight, is quite soft and tends to bounce. So I need the ball to fall to the ground at a medium speed, bounce a few times as it gradually settles. I also wanted the ball to feel natural as it landed and took off so used the squash and stretch method to achieve this. When looking back on the animation, I am quite happy with how it looks, the only thing I would pay more attention to would be the ending as I think the ball may need to slow down a bit more, before it comes to a stop.



The next ball I went to animate was the bowling ball. Now this is obviously a very heavy ball so would fall to the ground quite fast and as it is very solid and heavy there would not be much of a bounce. The ball would hit the ground at some force and since it’s too heavy to bounce I decided to carry that force into the ball rolling off to one side. So I decided to use hardly any squash and stretch and only a small bounce as the ball hit the floor. Looking back at the finished piece I am happy with how heavy the ball feels, again the only thing I think need more attention would be the speed at which the ball rolls off to the side. I think it needs to slow down more before it comes to a stop and it may also be going at too high of a speed to begin with.




And last off was the ping pong ball. Now this is the lightest ball of the three, and tends to bounce a lot when you drop it. So when the ping pong ball landed I wanted it to bounce quite high because it is so light and bounce quite a few times before it came to a stop. I dint want to use too much stretch and squash either as the ball is quite airy and doesn’t seem to have much of a impact when it hits the ground. So when watching the animation there are a few things I would change. First off the ball seems to bounce a bit too fast for a ping pong ball and secondly the ball needs to slow down a lot more at the top of its arcs as it looks like it’s going the same speed through out.



The ball project on a whole was a good and helpful when trying to get to grips with animation in Maya, or any animation. It is especially good when trying to understand the graph editor, which is so helpful when animating in Maya.


Ok on I next project we had a choice, and I chose to animate a human character picking up a heavy box and placing it on a table. I really liked the idea of this animation and really wanted to give some character to it. I decide to have my character start off looking down at the box and then stretch out as she got ready to pick up the box. She would then step forward to the box, spread out her legs a bit as she got ready to pick up the heavy box. She would then crouch down to the box, stabling herself has she went and then start to pull the box towards her so she could get a good grip on the box. She would then slowly lift the box up bending her head back and having her arms stretch slightly to show how heavy the box is. Once standing, but still slightly crouched as the box is heavy, she would stumble over to the table. As she came towards the table she needed to lift the box up high and push it onto the table. Then take a moment to rest and wipe her brow. Sounds simply enough, well I did have a few problems. First the rigged model I had to work with did not have any type of clamp on the hands which meant every time I moved her body her hand would move into the wrong position, which did make it quite difficult to keep the hand stable. Next problem was there was no way to rotate her arm from the shoulder. The rig gave you the option of moving the hand with an ik handle but would not let me rotate her joints. So this again made it even harder to keep the arm stable especially when she was stretching her arms out. When watching the final animation back I can say that I’m that happy with it. There are places where the arms are twitching a bit and the stretch just looks really robotic. The hands aren’t animated that well and need more attention. I also needed to have a few pauses in there like when she first puts the box down. I think the point where she lifts the box up and takes it over to the table looks quite good and I’m happy with how heavy the box feels but I think the way in which she puts the box down seems a bit too light and robotic, there also needs to be some more anticipation before she picks up the box. Some of the poses at in the animation could also be a bit better and do make the animation fell less dynamic especially at the end, and the legs don’t look quite right which need to be fixed, but over all I think I did ok but it could be a lot better. I did enjoy the exercise as I am really interested in doing 3d animation and definitely want to do a lot more in the future.

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.

The Old Recliner

Right, so we have completed making our chairs and now we need to deform them into our own chairs that we designed right at the beginning of the Maya lessons. This was definitely the most enjoyable part of what we have done so far as we now get a chance to be creative. I have decided to go for an old beat up recliner. I have added tears, a skew foot rest, duck tape, missing and loose buttons, and a spring poking out one of the tears. I have also pushed vertexes in around the chair so it looks a bit more beaten up.

I am really happy with how my chair came out and really like all the details I added to it. I am also happy with my lighting and the little bit of texture I added. There are a few little imperfections that would have changed but I have only really noticed them now. Like the side cushion, I would have pulled them out a bit more so they don’t look so sunken in, but over all I am quite happy with it. I think that through these exercises I have become a lot more confident with using Maya and have also learnt how important it is to light your scene correctly. The lighting has made a great difference to how my chair looks. If I was to take this chair further I would of created more of a grimy texture for the chair so that the material would appear old and dirty.

The Chair Project

Ok so the last Maya lesson we were carrying on with our chair project and well I don’t really have too much to say about the chair. Through doing this project I have gotten a bit quicker at using Maya and got a lot more comfortable with the tools. We also finished off the lighting and did some rendering and it shows how important the lighting is when it comes to how your render finally looks. I have to say that the biggest help was when James showed me how to go about modelling a head which was so interesting to watch. I haven’t yet modelled my own character and never really knew which way to go about but having that little bit of direction has really helped and I have now started creating my own character. It is definitely the most difficult thing I have tried to model but it was great giving it a try as I have learnt from it and know how I would do it different in the future. I am really keen to use Maya a lot more as I feel I’m only going to get better through practice, so most probably going to be using it on my first project.

First Maya Workshop

Well last Tuesday we had our first Maya workshop which I really enjoyed. I have used Maya before so I did know most of the things he was showing us but I still learnt a few extra tricks. I think the fact I had used the software before also helped me understand what he was saying a lot better and I found it to be helpful. I was also happy with the pace at which he went through the workshop and he covered a lot of key principles in quite a short period of time. I really look forward to learning more as I really enjoy using Maya and believe you can achieve some really great looking work using it. Of course now I have previously done the 2d workshops I am looking at it in a slightly different way. All the CGI animations we saw at Bradford were badly animated and modelled and I really want to push myself to create high standard animations using Maya .But since the last workshop I do feel I have a better understanding for modelling and feel that now I am able to visualize how to make a model slightly better. Well look forward to tomorrow’s session.

Interaction

Well I have finally finished my animation of the two characters interacting, and I am quite happy with the results. I think I have managed to use all the rules we have learnt quite effectively in this. One thing that I do need to improve is my pauses to allow the audience to register what is going on as well as the characters. For example when the smaller character kicks the ball at the larger character, the larger character gets up immediately to go over to the smaller character. Where really he should be looking around first to see what happened and then get up once he realises. Another example is when the smaller character starts crying the larger one almost immediately goes to scratch his head where really he needs time to register that the smaller character is upset and then scratch his head in guilt. So really I just need to make sure I space my animation a bit better in future. Otherwise I am happy with the movement of the characters, I really like my smaller characters’ jumping when he first comes into the scene. It was made up from some really nice poses. Another good thing that I find I am doing is starting to draw out the frames a lot quicker , they do look a bit rough but I think it still works. So overall I have found these sessions to be extremely useful especially in learning the principles of weight, anticipation, stretch and squash, volume, balance, staging and timing. I also think they are going to be extremely helpful when animating in Maya to stop it looking too stiff and lifeless.

Angry Man Animation

So last Tuesday we carried on with 2d animation, and we had a choice whether to animate an angry or happy character delivering a box on set. I chose to do the angry character as I always find it more fun to show anger. Now the character is a box man with a circle for a head so no facial expressions. The challenge was to portray how your character was feeling through his movement alone. So I decided to have my character slam the door open when he walked into the room, kind of stomp over to the table in the centre of the room, and then slam the box onto the table. He would then look at the camera start to argue and then out of rage kick the table resulting in the box falling onto the floor and then my character would chuckle at the situation. Okay, now all I had to do was animate it. Well first thing I learnt was if I want my door to slam open I mustn’t be afraid to bend my door out shape to really exaggerate the force at which the door was being pushed. Another thing was that my door would slam open and hit the wall behind it so therefore it should also bounce back from the wall. Well taking this into consideration really helped with the impact of my door and I was really happy with the result. Next my character had to get to the table so seems he doesn’t have legs I had him shuffle his way across the room with the box under one arm. Now my character would slam the box down onto the table. To begin with I had my character hold the box directly in front of him lift the box up over his head and then slam it down to the left. The problem with this was that it created an awkward unrealistic movement as it didn’t follow the correct line of action, so I changed this to have him bring the box to his left then lift up over his head and slam down to the left , and this created a much smoother movement. This also worked well as it prevented the character from holding the box directly in front of him and rather have him in profile to create a much more interesting pose. So in the end I was really happy with the result of my animation and I learnt some great tips from this exercise. I think that in future projects I will try and push myself to come up with more interesting scenarios.