Animating

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-framing them when needed. I first went through the animation adding in only the major movement key-frames. After this, I went back through it and started adding more key-frames in order to help perfect and fill in the gaps. I then went and used the graph editor within Maya to help make my animation appear smoother.




Below is the entire timescale of my animation with the red lines showcasing where a key-frame is. It should be noted that this timescale is only for the main body. There is a different timescale with different key-frames for every joint.




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