Maya – Character Pieces

The final task we were given for our term of Maya was to pick from a range of scenario reference footages to apply to the Moom character. We were to pick from either one longer piece or two shorter piececs. I went for two shorter pieces; karate kick and falling over.

I used the advice given to us to upload the reference videos into premiere and add a timecode in frames to give us a clearer and more precises idea of the timings of each key frames. As I scrubbed through the video frame by frame, I added a simple title card to each keyframe I picked out to make animating that little bit easier.

Maya – Tennis Ball, Bowling Ball and Shuttlecock

In our own time we were expected to complete a high standard trio of various ball bounces including a tennis ball, bowling ball and a shuttlecock. We were given reference footage for a couple of the expected bounces and the rigs. I really struggled with the shuttlecock exercise as it moves quickly almost unpredictably in its own way.

Maya – Walk Cycle

Still using the Moom character, the next couple of weeks were all about the walk cycle. At first I started blocking out the key frames for the leg movement. This also included hip rotation, toe and heel movement, and the extending of the body. Once this was up to standard, which took the whole lesson, I moved onto focusing on the arms followed by any tweaks that needed fixing. I found during the second lesson the torso was moving up and down too excessively so had to change that before finishing the arm movement.

Maya – Introduction to Moom

This lesson, we were introduced to the moom character. It was really difficult to understand all the rigs at first and how to control them but the more I practiced, the more easier it got. The tasks today were to pose the character in a resting pose, and a pose of our choice from the list we were given and I chose, “Moom is bowling a ball”.

Maya – Ball Bounce

I really enjoyed this lesson as we applied the basic animation ball bounce to Maya. I made several scene versions to block out key frames and to identify any mistakes that I made over small changes. I found this extremely useful as I would know exactly what I would need to change.

In this exercise, I exaggerated the squash and stretch which made the ball appear to have an almost enthusiastic character. Below I have include versions 1 and 4 of the block outs and the final version.

Maya – Hammer

This was an exercise to prepare in our own time applying all the knowledge we had learnt in the last 3 lessons, and I found it slightly difficult at first as I was still understanding how to move around Maya.

Maya – Graph Editor

This lesson we focused on making our simple animations more realistic in movement using the graph editor. It was really interesting and the tasks we were given were really helpful in understanding visually how each tweak worked in the editor. We were to animate five balls rolling back and forth each showing different speeds at various times; eg: fast beginning then slowing to a stop, slow beginning the speeding up, going a constant speed throughout etc.

For the second half of the lesson, we went back to the golf scenario and applied this knowledge to that but this time blocking out keyframes, and repeatedly playblasting them as they got more detailed in order to observe any movements that isn’t working.

After uploading the files, I  realised they still need refining, especially the fact the ball is traveling way too fast.

Maya – Keyframes

This lesson we began looking at the basics of animating in Maya and this introduced us to keyframing in this software. We began a simple exercise of just a ball rolling from one side to the other as we are all pretty much new to this program.

We then got given a slightly more challenging task of animating a golfing scene in which we had to animate the ball as well as the putter. I enjoyed this as it was more of a challenge and required more focus and attention to detail. The first trial was simply a straight up putt into the hole, whereas I decided to experiment at home with the second by making the putter hit the ball to fast causing the ball to bounce off the edge of the hole instead of going in.

Maya – Potato Head

Our first lesson to Maya was to understand the basic elements of the program including project set up and organisation, moving around the four viewpoints comfortable, zooming in and out, rotating the perspective view port,  but mainly introducing and getting comfortable with main arranging tools; move tool, rotate tool, and scale tool.

The first task was to arrange and put together Mr and Mrs Potato Head. In the lesson I only had time to arrange Mr Potato Head so did Mrs at home.

During the end of the lesson, we also got given a homework task of creating a poster, or comic strip using the Mr and Mrs Potato Head file. I got my inspiration from watching the tv show Hannibal right before I got stuck into the task.

Keyframes

This week we continued looking at essential tools in after effects, covering the basic and more advanced methods of keyframing.

Our first task was to create a rolling can using the given assets. This required the knowledge of the transform tools we picked up last week and then combining them with the new skills of keyframing we would be learning this week. The method of using keyframes was very straight forwards.

The second task we to create a working clock using the given assets. I edited around with the assets in Photoshop to create a different personal exercise by changing the frame colour and clock background and then imported it into After Effects. In this task, we covered more keyframes and their editing effects (ease in and ease outs, toggle hold keyframes and linear interpolations), simple shapes, and anchor points.