Class
In the morning class we watched through everyone’s presentations. They all were great and unique. During our presentation we received feedback on our character, story and animatic. For the character they said that we must keep in mind the length of the arms as they will have to reach his face, or we don’t need arms at all. We also discussed the story, they suggested to start on the ghost’s stomach rumble rather than on him sleeping, this is a good idea as the sleeping part is not a necessity. They also talked about adding shows of the ghost noticing the fridge or the sandwich and making him fly into the fridge rather than him picking up the sandwich.
In the afternoon we were tasked with watching 4 videos about using a rig and using the camera in Maya. The first video explained how to use the rig on a blob character and add sound to a scene. To start I blocked out the jump, all the frames came straight after each other as I was focusing on getting the key frames.
Next, I roughed out the timing of the movements by moving the key frames around till I was happy.
After the timing I added some inbetweens to smooth some of the movements and add so personality to the animation.
Lastly was moving the sound to the correct place, this involved adjusting the offset to so the sound would play at the right time.
We then had to export the animation using the playblast feature, to start I had to turn off the ‘NURBUS Curves’ and ‘Locators’, these are part of the rig they were turned off as they would have shown up on the exported clip. Next, I framed my shot so the animation would fit on the screen and exported it.
Overall, I like the way the animation came out, I think the sound matches up nicely and the movement looks good.
Homework
For homework we had to continue to watch and complete the tasks from class. The second video explained the how to use the camera in Maya. To add a camera, click the create tab and add a camera. Next click panels, perspective and click camera 1. After adding the camera, I framed my shot and zoomed into the blob character, using the camera is basically the same as animating, you click S to add a key frame. The video also explained how to edit the focal length of the camera, lowering the number will distort the picture, increasing the number the flatter the picture looks.
Overall, using the camera was not as hard as I suspected it would be. It feels like animating which is good as I was a bit nervous about using it.
The third video explained how to download QuickTime. QuickTime makes exporting using the playblast option easier as the files are not too big and will not have to be compressed and it takes less time to export.
The fourth video explained that I had to recreate the scene from Jurassic Park using simple models. To start I messed around with the camera and some of the characters accessories, since I was a little unsure how to work with so many characters, so I played with setting keyframes and moving the camera. I created this:
I first added the sound clip to the timeline and offset it so it would start at the beginning. Next, I watched the clip from the movie and blocked out the animation matching it to the sound as much as I could. After animating the characters in the scene, I set up the camera and started to animate the camera to follow the movements used in the clip. I set the focal lens to 25.
Overall, I am really proud of how this came out, I have never animated so many characters in on scene before and I think it came out great. However, there are some flaws; when the character in the blue stands up his arm glitches a little, I tried to fix it however it continued, I think I rotated the arm too much making Maya automatically turn the arm to fit it. After doing this task I can’t wait to use the camera function again.
Assessment 3
For the 30 second animation I have started to model the environment. I am working with Nicole and we have discussed who is modeling what in the scene. I made this diagram to show our roles. I was able to model the shelf and all the accessories that were on it.
