S2 WEEK 6-7
I didn’t focus so much on animated narratives on week 6 as the deadline for my 3D Digital Literacy project was coming up and I wanted to tie it all up before focusing on other things.
In week 7 we were told about rigging, and given exercises so that we could learn how to do it in Maya.
We were given the task of doing a simple jump cycle on the spot using either the Monty or the Ultimate Walker model, this task was given to us to help us with the animation for our own movement animation assignments. The assignment entails we create 2 short animations.
- One should be a study in weight of motion/body mechanics of a character (Such as jumping.)
- The second should be a study on conveying emotion/personality. (Like happy or angry.)
I managed pretty decently on the jump exercise for class, though it took me a while to remember to select the whole rig before making a keyframe instead of just moving the one area, so then the rig wouldn’t move uniformly. I figured it out pretty quickly though and the dope sheet was incredibly helpful when it came to this.
The next exercise was rigging a series of 3 cubes so that they moved in harmony with each other, and didn’t just rotate or move in a way I didn’t want it to. This was very helpful for teaching me the hierarchy of rigs, I also rigged a simple man model on top of this.
This week my group for assignment 3 got together that evening after class over discord. We organised ourselves over an excel sheet so that the progress of our pre-production, production and final outcome was relatively outlined, this allows us to pace ourselves so that we get the animation done on time, and also helps us keep on track what part of our production phase we should be in as the weeks go on.
In this excel sheet we organised what we would aim to achieve in the weeks leading up to the hand-in when it came to our animation, and who would do what in terms of the work. For example, we have Jodie doing the animatic on week 7 and me that same week focusing on the modelling. We’re sectioning up the work between us so we have everything we need in a timely matter. Once we had this sorted, that week we got to work.
I continued modelling the room this week, making more main assets such as a bookshelf, door and carpet and tidying up the room a little. After the main room was laid out, I started going ahead with UV-unwrapping all of the assets I had previously created in the room. I still need to scale some of the UV’s down as they’re too big right now, but I’m very proud of what I did with the UV’s in this room, as UV’s were very difficult for me to understand at first – I think I’m getting the hang of them, and am really happy I got them done ahead of schedule.
Later on in the week I also helped Jodie with the pre-vis a little. It was very cool to see the pre-vis getting done, as it finally allowed us to see what the slime will look like in the environment and world we created for it, and allow us to see if it seems natural. I worked on 11 seconds of the pre-vis, and as I’m still kind of getting used to animating in Maya it’s by no means the smoothest, but it get’s across the movement we want it to do, and a pre-vis isn’t meant to be seamless or pretty.
Overall I think I did a really decent amount of work over these few weeks