Character Design and Animation @de1155rhianjennings - Tumblr Blog

Evaluation

Overall, I have really enjoyed this module. Character design and animation seems to be one of my favourite parts of the course. Although I am happy with my final animation, I wish I had procrastinated a bit less as once I could see it coming together, I didn’t have the time to make the little but important changes I wanted too. I know I can do better than what I have done and I am considering doing something similar for 3rd year so I can fully focus on it.

One thing I really wasn’t happy with was the first walk with the small fish head, it wasn’t as fluent as I would have liked it, but it was either fix that and make it perfect, or finish my third walk. Another thing that I was disappointed with was they way the shell moves slightly from the first scene to the second. I tried everything I could to fix it and it still wouldn’t stay in the same place as the one on the first walk cycle.

On a more positive note, I loved the way Mr Fish catches his shell head as it begins to fall, I feel like it looks quite realistic. I would have liked to have been told how long RenderMan takes to render. Because I didn’t know it took so long, I started to use it and quickly realised I wouldn’t be able to use it. But I had enough time to download Mental Ray and use that which still looked really good.

This is my final animation of Mr Edgar Fish carrying a small object (small fish head), an awkward object (the shell) and a larger, heavier object (the puffer fish). Each walk cycle shows how he walks differently, or in certain cases, slides, for each of the objects.

The turn table I created to show off my character, Mr Fish and his different heads.

Although these images don’t do a great job of showing it, one is slight darker and the shell moves a bit on the second image. I had sat and waited for my first two walk cycles to render out, only to find out that one was lighter and one of my objects moved. I had to go back into maya, fix the lighting settings and render it back out. As for the shell moving, I copied over the exact coordinates of one to the other and it still moved.

When it came to rendering out my walk cycles I ran into a lot of problems with the lighting. As you can see above, it took me 4 goes to get it to a colour and brightness I was happy with.

Blocking

We were supposed to block out the strong poses and then fill in the in betweens, however I found this really difficult. The blocking of the poses was fine, it was just when it came to filling in the gaps, I could picture how the legs were and how the arms would have moved, were the shoulder would have sloped to etc... There was just too much to focus on a once. I found it much easier to animate as I went along and sometimes even animating one part such as the legs, then going to to do the arms and then going back again to do the bod movements. It seems to have worked pretty well for me but I would really like to get to grips with blocking out the main poses and then filling in the in betweens.

A very short playblast of the start of my animation.

I ran into the same problem again with the arms moving where they want to on certain keyframes. I still hadn’t found a solution for this problem, so again, I worked around it by keyframing every frame until I had got past the problem.

I ran into a problem with parent master were it wasn’t attaching but I simple selected all the objects, disconnected them and tried again. Sometimes it took a few goes but I eventually got it working fine.

When I got my first walk cycle to a position I was happy with, I tried rendering it out with Renderman as I had never used it before and thought I best get to grips with it now, rather than closer to the deadline. All the settings I used seem to work fine however the rate at which it was rendering was far too slow.

While animating on the master scene, I had only been animating from the camera angle which made everything look fine, it was only when I switched to perspective mode that I could tell how far out the arms and legs were. I should have known to check all angles from our 3D module last year!

The simple texture I used for the small fish head. I used the same method to texture this as I did for the puffer fish.

This is where parent master made this module a whole lot easier. Parent master allowed me to connect the small fish head to Mr Fish’s hands. This meant that I only had to move Mr Fish’s hands to were I needed them to be and the fish head would go too.

After I had animated a bit in the master scene, of course I ran into some problems. For some reason, at certain frames, the arms would move all over the place! I never actually found the reason for this. I went back and checked the referenced file in case there was a rogue key frame still there. I even tried deleting all the key frames from the section were the problem was and nothings seems to find it. Also, neither google or my friends had any idea why it was happening. In the end I just had to work around it which meant keyframing every frame until I had got past the problem.

As I had already done a simple walk cycle for Mr Fish, animating onto the master scene was pretty simple as I could use my previous one as a reference.

Animating with a referenced file

When I went to begin animating with my referenced Mr Fish file, I quickly realised that because I had referenced the file that I had also animated, I could animate over it. Maya doesn’t allow you to animate a character that has been referenced in if the referenced file already had animation on it. This was a problem as I wasn’t sure if I had saved Mr Fish before I had animated on him. Luckily I found my original rigged Mr Fish which was perfect to use for the reference.

How my puffer fish looked with his texture on and some simple spheres colours to look like eyes.

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