S2 WEEK 5
This week in class we spent the morning time watching all of our presentations we had created showing each groups journey so far in the pre-production of our animated shorts.
After lunch, in our journey to learn how to animate in Maya, this week we have increased the size of the things we work with when we are animating in Maya, in previous weeks, we’ve been working with very simple rigs to do very simple actions. This week, we took a little extra step and learnt how to add sound to our Maya animations, and how to manipulate the virtual cameras, as well as learn about Playblast, and learn about what 3D previs is.
We used a simple rig and animated to sound our little character doing a jump, and then but into practice the things we were learning about the virtual cameras, we were also demonstrated again how helpful the dope sheet can be when animating in 3D.
We did a basic animation excercise as you see above with a very simple character, we made it jump accompanied by a sound effect, the dope sheet was very VERY helpful for this, especially when it came to manipulating the keyframes. I ran into issues in parts however, as there were times I forgot to select the whole model before adding a keyframe, so then when I played it back certain parts of it wouldn’t move with the direction I wanted them to. I’ve learnt from this however, and will be more diligent when it comes to this in the future.
We also learnt and did excercises surrounding 3D previs, which we will be doing for our own animations!
This week I continued modelling for my group animation as I’m the one modelling the base enviroment our animation is taking place in.
I’ve only got the very basic assets as of yet though, with 2 walls, the floor, and a table. To create these I am actually following the guidance of a tutorial to make a scene, in a 57 video long modelling, UV mapping, and rendering tutorial by Game Dev Academy on YouTube. It’s very helpful when it comes to teaching me new things – and the things I already learnt I’m just reminded of and it helps me retain that knowledge. As I go through it and learn more, I’ll deviate from the source tutorial and make it look like the enviroment concepts we’ll have for our animation.
