Tag: animation

Kelvin taught us two different ways of rigging up our characters. Placing the points manually to make a skeleton and connecting them by hand, or by using the quick rig system which I ended up doing.

After getting the skeleton working, I began trying to apply the Mocap data supplied by Billy during one of the in-person classes to the rig.

This caused problem after problem.

To start, I was initially trying to apply the mocap animation to my handmade skeleton. This failed to work multiple times until Kelvin suggested the use of a quick rig.

Then, multiple parts of the model began failing due to weight paints affecting them. The staff and the scarf were the two biggest issues regarding this.

At this stage of my project, I was reliant on a lot of help from Kelvin. After sending over my file, he was able to get the scarf working, and came up with an idea of separating the staff section of the model to make it its own poly, and then attach it to a point on the rig. Not only did this work for the staff, I was also able to apply it to the scarf section as well, and get the animation looking tolerable to begin with.

From there I needed to tweak the mocap data a bit to remove points where the model had heavy clipping and also try to alter it as best I could to fit the image I had for what the animation was supposed to look like. Once altered, and rendered out, this was the final result of my hard work.

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In year 1, we began learning a bit about the basics of animation. However a lot of what we did use premade animations and simple techniques overall. I still 100% consider myself a beginner on the side of animating anything, and this was pretty apparent when we began learning how to animate in Maya.

A lot of sources have stated that Maya is the ‘industry standard’ for a lot of people when it comes to animation. I can definitely understand this, with many tools and options being available for people to use to perfect their animated characters. However, for someone who has never animated in his life, the number of options quickly overwhelmed me.

For one of our first lessons, we were tasked with animating a sack. Thankfully, it came pre-rigged and ready to work with, but this still didn’t make the job any easier for me. We were asked to try making the sack show emotion, watching a few cartoons and other media to outline the basics of how animation principles work. After a lot of difficulties, I was able to make this:

I tried to make the sack look sad/depressed, having it take a big sigh out before slumping over. I added a small bit where it would look around to see if anyone cared, but then go back to slumping over. While I was given positive feedback regarding my depiction of the sack, I still think I could have done better, with the idea of what the sack feels like being hard to read without me stating it directly beforehand.

Animation is something I definitely need to work on.