Now that the pre production was complete and the group was happy where the project was heading, it was time to start modelling our characters and animating them.
First of all I had to model my character. For this I used MAYA as my robot was a hard surface model. I needed the character model first as I had to make a 3d previs to show the group in more detail the timing and compostion of my scene.
As soon as I had my model built and the bushes from the animatic made I was able to ask one of the other group members for thier model of their character so that I could being to animate the previs. The previs allows me to know the timing and composition of the scene I’m making and it reuires limited animation to do so.
After I finished the previs it was time to start animating the final scene. For this I needed to rig my model so that it was easier for me to control as well as the rest of the group who needed my model in their scenes.
As my characters limbs and features are fairly basic, it did not take make controllers to rig him. Each arm’s ball joint was parented to the body and the arm parented to the joint, with a perspective controller added to control which way the arm would point based on the place of the respective controller. The head had something similar, a perspective controller parented to the head to animate it’s position too. Then all it took was a controller to move the whole body.
When the characters were designed, modelled and rigged, I was able to start building up the environments I needed for my scenes.
To animate the characters you use key frames to place certain objects at specific points along the timeline. You manipulate the object such as a characters are, the entire body or a piece of background detail and press S as a shortcut to set a keyframe, meaning that all the transformations set will go to that location at that point is the timeline.
Before I start the rendering process I have to set the correct lighting for the scene. As the scene is set in the forest it is important to to make the lighting mimic what it would be like in real life.
When setting up my lights I went to the Arnold tab and added a skydome light so the set was evenly lit. The I added some directional lights and manipulated the settings to match other members of the groups scene so the continuity fits well throughout the video.
Finally when it comes to editing the final scene it’s time to set up the render process so I get a crisp clean video file from the animated setting in MAYA. I set the frames I want to render in the render settings tab and run the render.
Once my rendered file is completed I can take all the finished rendered video files and put them all together in Premier Pro to edit our final group video together with sound effects and music.
