Animation Summary :)

For this report  I am going to be explaining how I created my animation piece and why I created my particular character and its movements within my animation piece.

For this animation project, I was given the task of creating a piece of animation that shows a character’s emotions and characteristics through a 30 second animation. I was given a list which had eleven character traits and action traits. The idea behind the animation would be to join one of each trait together and that would be the brief for the animation. For this project I chose to adjoin frustrated to the action of lifting a heavy object.

I decided that I want my animation to be different and quirky and not take the obvious route of modelling a human. So I decided to use a windup toy for my main character. The story behind my animation starts with Skully the windup toy being situated at one end of a table where he is focused on a pencil at the other end of the table. He looks down at the winder and slowly rotates his head which winds himself up, and when his head comes back to its original position he starts to move... only two steps. He then looks down and then come back up to the camera, where its cuts to a screen saying “ One Hour and 100 steps Later”. When then see Skully finally holding the pencil, but he wants to lift it up over his head. He then tries to lift the pencil, but we can see that the pencil is too heavy for him and he then becomes frustrated as we see with the expression on his face. Then with all his might he flips the pencil over his head, where it lands just behind him, where his head rotates to see this and then returns back to give us a cheeky wink.

The first part of this animation was creating the character Skully. I modelled the character off the windup toy I had purchased. This process was quite straightforward and I had no problems as such. I modelled my character off an image plane then by using one polygon for each part of the character and extruding.  Once I had created one arm and leg, I then used the duplicate special tool which allowed me to duplicate both parts and replace them on the opposite side of the character.

Once I had completed my character I then moved on to the skeleton. This I have to say was the hardest part of this project, as when working on my character I should have modelled in a T Pose which would have allowed a better and more controllable rig/ skeleton. Also when animating I noticed that what I wanted to achieve with my character I could not do as I had not set my rig correctly.

After completing both of the above processes I then moved on to my scene. For this I created a table which included a two level self which had many books placed on it. Also included on the table were a wine glass and a pencil. Also the table has a wood texture to give the scene a realistic and believable look. I then added two side planes to create the illusion of walls and a bottom plane for the floor which was also given a wood texture to represent laminate flooring.

After all of these components were completed I then moved on to animating. This process was quite straight forward, the only issue I had was that Maya would not allow me to place my cameras on a motion path, for reason I do not know. This means that by animation is broken up into many section of film so overall I have five AVI files, which I have combined to make my final film.