This semester, we started off my doing some animation practice. Using a ball and a wall, we were re-introduced to the 12 principals of animation. I enjoyed 2D animation last semester, so it was fun using the same principals in 3D.
I then used the same principals to create this blob jump. Using the controls for this shot were a little trickier than the ball, but I still enjoyed animating a proper character this time.
On week 6, Mike taught us about point and orientation constraints. This was my favourite animation so far. By parenting the wheel and seats to their own controls, and parenting the seats to the wheel, I was able to create a moving ferris wheel being disturbed by the wind. It was also fin to make the ferris wheel move in a loop on Maya by copying and pasting the first keyframe to the last keyframe, meaning while playing on Maya, the wheel never stopped moving.
This week was a little more difficult. We were shown how to parent joints and bind them to a mesh when rigging a character. After doing this, I then parented controls to the joints, so I wasn’t adding keyframes to the joints. I didn’t enjoy painting on skin weights to our mesh’s as when I painted on one joint, the rest could change, so it took a very long time to get them balanced so the mesh didn’t distort or move when a weird way when animating.
I didn’t think I would enjoy creating the Jurassic Park Previs as much as I did. It was very satisfying to me comparing the movements I created with the camera and characters compared to the actual scene in the first Jurassic Park movie. It was a bit tedious sometimes as it took a long time to create. It did, however, make me excited to create my own Previs as it was fun moving the characters without worrying too much about in-betweens and small details.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t complete much of the lighting exercise as Maya kept crashing when I entered render view after adding a new light and changing the intensity. I was able to render a single frame when I turned down the render settings, but at the time our uni computers where we sat weren’t working, so I had to keep the settings very low on my laptop. I enjoyed learning about 3 point lighting for characters and as well as this, I was able to create an Arnold sky dome light along with a spotlight coming through the window. I feel as though I learned a lot through these tutorials, even though it took much longer than expected to practice them.
