To begin preparation for your next project, the character design, modeling, and rigging, we need to get started soon so that you have something to rig by the end of March. With this in mind, your homework for this week is to complete your initial character work:
Research and find reference material for the type of character that you would like to create.
Work through several sketches and/or a maquette (bonus).
Create your image planes.
Start a Maya project folder with at least something in it started toward modeling.
Upload initial work to Blackboard for a homework grade by Thursday, March 28.
See here for details. (For sake of time, the maquette portion may be omitted or completed for bonus).
Complete and submit by Thursday, April 11. Be prepared to present your work in class.
Animate and upload the following scenes (.zip of project folder along with separate 1280×720 h.264 .mov file):
dive (from text, ch 4)
“flour sack sees the spider” from class (linked here earlier) or “coin pickup” (from text, ch 7)
one stylized walk cycle (such as a run, sneak, happy or sad walk, etc. – see text and also “Animator’s Survival Guide”)
video reference clip from class exercise completed
performance piece (most weight will be given to this): 1. Choose a sentence or so of an audio clip from a film, game, etc. or record your own. 2. Decide the “performance” for the scene — this may consist of one to three camera shots. 3. Create your camera or camera shots and any minimal background scenery needed. 4. Animate the primary and secondary animation of your character for the scene performance, then proceed to finish the facial expression animation and lip-sync to the audio clip.
Be prepared to present/critique clips in class.
You may use any of the freely available rigs. The masked-character would be good to test for some of these, as it will be used later in the production, but you may also use some of the rigs mentioned and linked earlier in class and on the blog.
Here is a site that you may find useful for finding a fun audio clip. Be creative in whatever you choose and think of an interesting performance that relates to your audio, perhaps in an unexpected or witty way, to make your animation more fun and dynamic.
We’ll work on this some as a class exercise. This clip will also be one of the several for your “project #2.”
Here is a link to the folder with the video image sequences already prepared for you.
Download one of your choice, bring in as an image plane (with image-sequence button checked). Use this as a guide to find your extremes/breakdowns for each action, leading to which poses you keyframe for pose to pose animation. As a reminder, keyframe the major body motion of the poses first, then work your way down the hierarchy of character movement toward secondary animation.
As we continue through discussing character animation, follow along with this material in your books:
Chapter 4 in “Character Animation” detailing some more practice on anticipation and timing. The dive exercise from this chapter will be part of your upcoming project 2.
Chapter 5 in “Character Animation” working more with walk cycles. (Also, see the supplemental material from “Animator’s Survival Guide” for many great examples of different walks).
Also, begin chapter 7 in “Character Animation” — this discusses important material for “acting-out” a scene. The “coin pick-up” is one choice for your upcoming project 2.
Lastly, read chapters 3 & 4 in the “How to Cheat in Maya 2013: Tools and Techniques for Character Animation” for more material on using the graph-editor and tools in Maya for effective key-framed animation.