Character Animation
Week 1
Within Maya I practiced movement by using the timeline at the bottom of the screen. To do this I added in the sphere and then pressed the S key on my keyboard to create a keyframe on the timeline each time a movement was made.
This shows a short animation of the sphere moving left to right.
This is another animation of me practicing different movement of objects through the timeline.
I then wanted to create another animation with the sphere bouncing across the screen. I began by changing my workspace to Animation as shown in the image.
I then imported in a reference image for the moving ball into Maya along with me adding the front view with the perspective view on screen.
The sphere object was brought into Maya and I used the reference image to move the ball into the correct place. While moving the ball I keyframed the values from the reference image into the timeline.
The video above shows all the values placed in the timeline with the bouncing ball moving in sync with the time frame image.
I then removed the reference image and when I played a bouncing ball moving across the screen is shown.
From the side view the movement of the ball in the air was keyframed in Frame 1 shown on the image above.
I then set the next keyframe in frame 10 when the ball was hitting the ground.
When played together the up and down motion of the ball is shown showing the bouncing effect.
After that I wanted to create a squash effect when the ball was hitting the ground. I did this by changing the Scale of Y, X and Z in the top right corner and applied it to the ball while adding it to the timeline.
This is the video of the bouncing ball after the quash effect has been applied when it hits the ground.
Colour was then added to the bouncing ball along with me adding in a plane filled in black for the ground.
Arm Rig
From the poly modelling menu I used the poly cube to create the arm, hand and fingers as the whole arm will eventually be animated.
I then went to the modify menu and froze the transformation.
The next step was moving the pivot point in-between each areas of the joint in the arm. The pivot points was placed in-between the middle arm, hand and each finger. Doing this allowed fluent moving between each part of the arm when animating.
I then started to parent the arm connecting each part of the arm together from the hand to the back of the arm.
This is the final animation of the arm rig in maya.
Character pose and head turn
I began by downloading and importing the eleven rig into Maya.
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I started to get used to the controls of the rig by playing around and moving different parts of the rigs body.
The first pose I created was the ninja pose as shown in the images above. To create this pose I I had to raise his arms, raise one of his legs and lower one of his jaws for the mouth to open.
The second pose I created was the running pose. This required me to lower the position of the rigs hip and upper body. The legs then had to be pulled back along with one of the knees bending. I then stretched out the hands to make it look like he was touching the floor.
Head and body turn animation.
Firstly when animating the head I clicked on the rigs head control and used the rotate tool to turn the rigs head.
I then moved the hands, hips and leg while applying it to the timeline to create a whole body turn on the rig,
Assignment 2
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For this short animaiton I wanted to make my character throw a ball so I began by putting him in a throwing position by changing the postions of the arms, legs, hips and head.
I then added in the ball and this was the sphere from the poly modelling section of Maya.
I then had to shrink the ball and move it into the hand of the rig. I also closed the hand of a rig a bit more to look the ball is in a tight grip.
The movements and change of postions on the rig was being applied to the timeline
This is the short throwing animation.
Assignment 3 - 11 second animation
II first began the animation by creating and adding the props such as the table, chair and tablet. Once that was done I imported the rig into the scene, changed their features and placed them in the right starting position for the animation.
The sound was also imported into the timeline. The sound I used was from the 11 second club website and it was called 'Important decisions.'
Due to their being talking from the sound clip I had to animate the mouth the rig. I did this by moving the bottom jaw of the rig up and down as well as changing the shape of the mouth. These mouth movements was then applied to the timeline.
This was the final scene of my animation which shows the standing rig leaning on the table. When doing this I had to rotate his hips forward to create a leaning effect. I also had to animate his hands to look like it was properly leaning on the table.
This is the finished 11 second animation create through Maya.