This week it was finally time to start animating. Each member of my team completed our models and had our allocated scenes to animate independently. I had scene two and scene eight. Scene two was a small scene consisting of one of the swordfish swimming up beside the puffer fish and smiling. Scene eight however was a big one, it featured the swordfish fighting each other only to be ate by the shark in front of the puffer fish. The scene ends with the shark swimming at the camera with its mouth open to show him eating the puffer fish. I set the scene, imported everyone’s models including mine and started tweaking each fish models movements. This included eye movements, fin movements, tail and full body movements. I had the animatic up at the same time to make sure I was following it as close as possible. I made some slight changes from the animatic just to keep the animation within the desired time frame.
I had a bit of trouble at the start, getting the key frames to work with the smaller fin movements but with time and patience I got it figured out. As a group we all kept good contact with each other on discord, asking questions and making sure our scenes will flow smoothly with each others. In these images, the background consists of planes, designed by Mark. These may not be featured in the final render though as we are currently looking at bringing in an HDRI map for our skydome light as it would add more depth and realism. So far the group is making great progress, and we hope to get started rendering soon.