Week 8 - basic animation

This week we learned some more advanced animation, the first assignment was to create a bouncing ball then import a copy of the ball and change its location an bounce height so you end up with two different bounces. I also added a rotation to the ball using the graph editor to make it bounce more realistically!

The second assignment was to use the robot arm model supplied, and create a 'blocking out' of the robot arm picking up the can. I tried adding a bit more character to the arm rather than just the basic motion. This was a good intro to setting keys on control curves and using linear/stepped splines for the blocking phase - thats why the animation appears jumpy! We will work on constraining the can and cleaning up the animation next week!

Week 7 - intro to animation!

This week we had two simple animations to complete, they sounded quite simple to start but were a great way to learn the basics of setting keyframes and editing the Graph Editor. The Graph Editor looks like it will be massively important when it comes to animation!! so we will need to become new best friends if i'm to become a successful animator! We learned how to edit the spline curves and tangents to make movement move fluid, its a great intro as when I have previously attempted to use this I found it extremely confusing!
This week we created an animation of a sphere moving through space to get us used to keyframes and also a sphere moving in a simple circle from a 2d viewpoint, but had to create a smooth circular motion rather than a diamond shaped motion through editing the spline curves!

weeks 1-6 - lighting and rendering

Finally, here is the scene with lights added to create the look of the sun casting down with shadows, also the images are rendered in higher resolution... next on to animation!

weeks 1-6 - texturing

Here is my scene with added colour and textures, I added some reflections on the surfaces such as the rails but these don't really show up until you add lights to the scene.

weeks 1-6

Just a recap of the first 6 weeks of the Animation Mentor Maya Springboard course!
So far we have learned the basics of creating and manipulating objects in Maya, created a simple character and a hierarchy so all the limbs move correctly and with eachother!, created a set and learned how to place cameras to create shots and finally learned the basics of lighting, texturing and rendering our scenes.

I will attach some pics in further posts so can can see the visual progress of my scene, the character I created had a 'surprised' expression so when it came to creating a scene to place him in I decided on a swimming pool and to have him being pushed of a diving board! ( I was probably thinking about holidays at the time also...) I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, but see what you think!

My character with hierarchy

My pool scene

Pool scene camera 1

Pool scene camera 2