3D Character Animation

Everything is now done so I thought this post would just be of me reflecting on this model and animation. I am very happy with how the model has come out. I think that during the modelling of it I became more confident with using the software. It took a long time to make but I now think that if I was to model another similar character, I would be able to in half the time it took to model this one. This new character would also be of better quality. With regards to texturing, I definitely think I could of made it a lot better had Maya 2018 not had issues with me trying to UV map. Had I also been more adequate with the software I may have been able to solve the issue. However I think that using what I could, I did a pretty alright texture. Rigging went pretty well to be honest thanks to that tutorial video which introduced me to the Quick Rig tool. This did most of the work for me. It was incredibly useful. However when it came to animating there were quite a few issues that ...

Here is the final complete rendered animation of my Captain America model performing the Carlton Dance from Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Now that the animation was complete and the lighting and camera sorted out, it was time to render my animation. I used the Arnold renderer and the batch sequence option to render out my animating at the HD720 setting. It the created an image of every frame and saved each in the '.exr' format. Once every frame had been rendered, I used Adobe After Effects to import all images as a '.exr' sequence. This put all of the frames together into a movie which was then turn ed into a '.avi' file. Now the '.avi' file has an extremely large file size so to counteract this, I uploaded it to YouTube and then I re-downloaded it. It became a 'MPEG-4' file thus heavily reducing the file size without greatly reducing the quality.

Now that the lighting was sorted out, I had to decide how I want my animation to be seen. It was going to be through a camera but was the camera going to move or stay still. I toyed with the idea that the camera would in a circle around my model but in the end I decided on keeping it still. This is due to that when the camera moved I feel like it took from the animation. It should be still as I imagine the viewer as an audience member at the stage and then Captain America comes on and performs this outrageous dance.  Below to the left is an image of where in Maya the camera is in relationship to the model and animation.  Below to the right is what the camera actually sees.

To make my animation look a little better I decided to add a floor of which Captain America would dance on. In the end I decided to change the floor to an image of his iconic shield. That wasn't too hard. I just assigned a circular plane to feature this image as it's texture.  This was the the result. I used a large front light, a smaller back light and and spotlight over the top of him. Whilst it did incorporate all the colors associated with him, I didn't like the look of it. The three lights were moved around so each variation of the three colors was tried. This didn't make it better so i tried just eliminating some of the colors. Eventually I settled on this. The spot light above him was removed and the only color of the lights is white. I really like the look of this. He looks pure and bright. The lights really help with the base as well. The model/base stand out from the dark black background. It is almost as if he is performing on a stag...

The animation which I have to do has to be at least 10 seconds long. From the reference clips I chose to do the Carton dance one from the fresh Prince Of Bel Air. I analysed the clip and picked out 11 seconds to animate from 0.42 to 0.53 seconds. I chose to do 11 seconds as in the clip at that point the characters finish a dance move. Had I only done 10 seconds then the animation would have finished mid dance move. Because of this slight change, I made sure to change my animating preferences in Maya 2018 before I set my key frames. I changed the frame-rate to 30 frames per second and the end point to 330 as 330 frames divided by 30fps equals 11 seconds. I remembered to do this as for my animation last semester, I originally unintentionally made a minute long animation instead of the 10 second one I planned. This was due to my preferences being set at 24fps and I had over 1000 frames. Once the preferences were made I started getting along moving the joints into place and then key...

In order to rig up my model I first turned to YouTube in order to find a good YouTube video. I ended up stumbling onto this video. Journey to VR: Rigging in Maya - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQwBOLJrgck Now with my last model I rigged it all manually, starting with add the joints and parenting them together. Once the joints wee done I skinned it to the model and painted weights before adding in control curves. However the video ran me through how to rig via the QuickRig tool instead of rigging manually so I gave it a go. It started with clicking on the QuickRig tool button.  The menu to the left popped up and the 'Step-By-Step' option was selected. Then I had to select my model and add it to the 'Geometry' list box by clicking on the add/plus symbol under Geometry. Step 2 involved adding the guides for where the joints will be. Upon clicking on 'Create/Update' for this step, a lot of guides were spread out across my model automatically. Most of t...