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.

" Stretch and Squash "

Ok so last Tuesday we got a chance to do some traditional animation and to my surprise I actually really enjoyed it. I don’t tend to like drawing things over and over which is one of the reasons I enjoy CGI animation, but I think the challenge of trying to produce a life like jump really pulled me in. I also found myself starting to better understand the timing behind the animation and how many frames are needed to achieve different movements. I was really surprised when I first calculated how many frames I needed for the anticipation of the jump, but I think that this played the most important part in making my character seem heavy. The squash and stretch technique really brings life to the character and prevents it from looking too wooden. I was really pleased with how my animation turned out because I think that my character did appear to have weight. The most difficult part I found was trying to keep my character the same volume while using the stretch and squash technique. I have also finished my lighter character and again I am quite happy with the result. I think the main problems on it was trying to keep the volume constant and I think I could of maybe made the character appear a bit lighter. The project on a whole was very enjoyable and I would like to try some other actions using this technique.

Well Disney’s “Fantasia” is just an amazing piece of artwork. It really makes you marvel at Disney’s technical abilities when it comes to animation and what they were able to achieve at that time. They are masters at creating realistic movement using some really unorthodox characters. Like in Fantasia's "Dance of the Hours", where a thin smaller alligator dances with a large heavy hippo, the movement are so fluid and gives the illusion of a heavy hippo without making it unreal for the alligator to lift her. Preston Blair was the animator behind this scene as well as “the sorcerer’s apprentice”. Another great animator that worked on Fantasia’s dancing mushrooms was Art Babbitt who was also the creator of one of my favourite characters, “goofy”.