Animation I - Character


Time to bring life to a character.

The last two projects both involved character animation. For the first one, we had a rigged macquette character, Mack, who we sat down as a group and took through the motions of a short vignette. In the second part, we took the base geometry for Mack, rigged him ourselves, and each of us ran a short animation to prove he could move correctly.

Part one, in more detail, involved several stages. After getting Mack and the short story we were supposed to animate with him, we put together a storyboard and key poses. We shot a live-video version of the story with each of us acting it out, to use as animation reference. Finally, we each did two or three seconds of animation on Mack, blended all our parts together, and had the final 13.6 second video.

Gawd aweful lot of work for something that looks so simple.  :)




Live Action - 5.1 MB

For public amusement, here's the live action version of us acting out the story. There were five people in our group, but only three of us got saved on the tape. Chad and Allie appear by permission of themselves; I personally think I would rather not appear here at all. But hey, as crappy as my non-acting was, I must point out I was the only one who made it under the time limit.  ;)


COFFEEEEE!!! - 3.2 MB

Out of Coffee
Mack is drinking his morning cup of coffee. He realizes soon that the cup is empty and he wants a refill. He stands up and tries to get the waiters attention. The waiter passes by without noticing. Mack feels dissapointed and frustrated and stis back down.

Music is "Black Dog" by Led Zeppelin





We learned a lot in this, and I personally learned I'd rather do a lot of things than animate a character. Shading, lighting, ... clean up? Oooooh, boy, here's an amusing anecdote:

We built the animation as five separate pieces. Two of them we merged before rendering to video, the others we tried to add in after rendering. It was amusing in the least. Three seconds of smooth motion, then the scene lights rearranged themselves. Another few seconds of smooth motion, and the back of the chair fell off. Then a bit later, the back of the chair glued itself on again. I learned at this point that the position of trouble-shooter and renderer is not a skill to be taken lightly. Guess who fills that role in Animation II next quarter?  :)





As an intermediate between projects, I sat down to play with render settings and figure out how some of the less common ones worked. Of course I could have used a still image for this, but I like glowy things and spinning things and little ball toys, so I made some. Here's one quick version just for grins.



Render Settings - 800 KB

Just a simple shot of a simple scene. Gamma setting was 1.00, the Maya default, and I was experimenting with brightening or darkening the render.




Coming up next, final project... to be developed, of course.



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