Animation Tests

I created a series of walk cycles in Maya to get me back into the software and for animation practice. I used the Max for Maya rig from http://www.highend3d.com/. At the moment my biggest problem when animating in Maya is only seeing the data rather than the actual poses and I end up getting lost in the numbers, spending hours getting confused over how many units a foot should be raised by. This has helped to adjust my way of thinking but I am still struggling with it. I think the animations have worked OK but they all need tweaking. Here are the three that I think are the most successful.

Another problem I had when animating in Maya was not being able to view all of my keyframes at once. There is a ghosting option, but this only works for objects with keys and as I had keyed the nurb controllers rather than the characters geometry, that was all that could be ghosted. I got round this by applying a snapshot to the geometry, which I could place in a new layer and update after I had made any changes.

Project Aims

The area I want to focus on is character animation and acting, and I feel a vignette would best allow me to develop my skills in this area. I would like to animate two characters; a humanoid and a creature, and incorporate a range of basic actions like walks, runs and jumps. To escape from the generic CG look I would like to give the vignette a mixed media influence. I am very interested in stop motion so will emphasise elements such as texture, depth and lighting. I will animate in Maya and composite in After Effects.

Welcome

I am a third year animation student at Lincoln University (UK). This blog will be documenting the making of my short film. My initial idea for this project was to create three 40 second animations of different media that link together to tell a story. I was planning on one of the sections being stop motion, one cut out probably using After Effects and one 3d computer using Maya. However, we have been recommended to keep the length down to one minute and an emphasis has been placed on computer animation. I have therefore decided to concentrate purely on 3d computer animation as I wish to increase these skills the most and it has the greater job prospects.