For this week’s session, we learned how to use certain features when animating in Maya. The first thing that was covered was animating to sound, in which we were made to animate a character in sync with a sound effect. After this, we then learned how to manipulate the virtual camera and how to use playblast to export the file to a video format. This wasn’t too difficult to manage and I feel that I did really well considering I am still getting accustomed to Maya. Moreover, this exercise itself was rather fun and I enjoyed the process of learning how to use these features in order to improve animation. In the future, I will keep this information in mind when I help to animate our final animation as it will definitely be handy to be aware of. Below is a video of my outcome from today’s lesson…
My animation outcome
Above is my outcome of this task. I decided that I wanted the character to show emotion, as well as jumping towards the camera. The reason I wanted to try this was to figure out if I could get specific reactions from doing so- I wanted mine to express feelings of joy, but also to be a bit uncomfortable, hence the illusion of lack of space between the camera and rig. The end result feels almost ominous, which is what I was sort of going for. This animation itself has helped me to a great extent with how to understand the controls and movements of 3D models, and due to this, I am now able to do so in order to convey a scene.
Exercise – 04 – 3D Previs
During the afternoon of today’s session, we were given the task to make a basic previs of this scene from Jurassic Park. Our limit was to animate at least 38 seconds in and the focus was to use this lesson to understand how previs can be really useful for pre-production in animation. Not only that, but personally for me, this task has given me a better knowledge of how the cameras can be manipulated to change a scene. One of the main things I like most in my previs is how the camera follows the characters’ movements and changes from different angles. This makes the animation less boring and more immersive to the viewer. Ultimately, learning how to use previs has shown me that it is more effective to start with this and progress from here- in a way, it’s like sketching a drawing to map out the composition and movements. If I were to redo this task, I would definitely try to spend more time on it. Due to other tasks and classwork, this deemed to be really difficult to manage all at once, thus resulting in this piece being less quality and under the time limit than I intended for.
Previs Practice
Reference video: