In my week 9 day off I decided to have a go at doing the lifting heavy crate animation in Maya to see how hard it would be and to further test my skills in Maya. I started by sketching out some bar sheets for the task and this time to aid in this matter I didn't just observe my reference footage I decided to follow Johny's advice and use page 256-257 of the Animators survival kit as the writer of the book Richard Williams had studied other animators work to produce his own style, it felt right that I should do the same to aid my development in doing Animation in Maya.
Reference footage.
I felt at first this wouldn't be an easy task in doing such a complicated performance and was rather nervous. I had an idea that would help me in this animation. I laid out the set of polygon cubes in apple and added a cube in front of the buckid rig. The idea being I would animate the character first then animate the cube being lifted up and placed down on the floor as I didn't know how to keep the hands on the box when being moved. I first animated the rig examining the box to see how it could be lifted up. The limbs and head were animated one by one using the quick sets that I created prior to the animation. However as I've seen in the past months animating the limbs was difficult as they moved at the wrong moments such as at the start of the animation the head tilted before it was supposed to and the hand not being at the right position when placed on the hip.
In doing this animation the weight of the crate needed to be considered, and since it was heavy I made sure the legs were spread further apart and going at a slow pace to compensate the weight the rig was carrying.
This was then corrected, however the next issue was in the walk, as I found in my refined walk animation the feet didn't move correctly and at the wrong time. The answer though was in the key framing and when a foot was planted down I used "translate x" to hold it in place. I did remember what Johny had told me on this matter and looked to the graph editor in terms of the walk to help correct the feet movements and holding positions. I felt the need to look to the graph editor in doing the remainder of the animation to get an idea of the key frames and undo any mistakes. This was seen when animating the crate for lifting it up.
I felt that the crate was moving too soon when rotating it to look like it was at an angle before it was meant to. Using the editor I made removed the frame that caused this and it moved in the correct position when being lifted. I felt the more difficult aspect of this was the hand positions in lifting and placing down the crate. The movements in pushing the crate back when placed down was done using the IK/FK blend tools, but as I found in the pushing and pulling animations it was very difficult in placing the hands on the crate and make sure they were in the right place when the hands moved away from the crate.
The animation, ended the character being exhausted from lifting the crate and showing this through moving him up and down to show him recovering.
Looking back I would think this task was challenging, and most difficult in terms of the movements and positioning. There are somethings I would do differently such as the animating of the characters arms to get a better positioning and try and see if I could hold the crate in place before it was lifted up. I would think that using the graph editor whilst animating did help considerably in terms of the feet movements an in holding the crate in position. It shows that Johny's advice was sound and helped a lot.
In hindsight I should've realised the difficulties in doing this animation in Maya, however I wouldn't realise it without attempting the exercise, as this was the point of the module to see what I was good at and what was my weakness in Animation. I would think that I'd done a good attempt at the lifting heavy crate exercise despite the issues. The feedback that I would receive on this exercise would help refine it better and in the hopes that this week we learn how to make the rig hold its hands on the crate without animating them separately would be a great help in the exercise refinement.
In future I shall look into experimenting with the rig, to best see how the movements in the rig could show moving the boxes in the animation with a simple lift and put down.
Animation.
 |
| Lifting heavy crate barsheet. |
I felt at first this wouldn't be an easy task in doing such a complicated performance and was rather nervous. I had an idea that would help me in this animation. I laid out the set of polygon cubes in apple and added a cube in front of the buckid rig. The idea being I would animate the character first then animate the cube being lifted up and placed down on the floor as I didn't know how to keep the hands on the box when being moved. I first animated the rig examining the box to see how it could be lifted up. The limbs and head were animated one by one using the quick sets that I created prior to the animation. However as I've seen in the past months animating the limbs was difficult as they moved at the wrong moments such as at the start of the animation the head tilted before it was supposed to and the hand not being at the right position when placed on the hip.
In doing this animation the weight of the crate needed to be considered, and since it was heavy I made sure the legs were spread further apart and going at a slow pace to compensate the weight the rig was carrying.
This was then corrected, however the next issue was in the walk, as I found in my refined walk animation the feet didn't move correctly and at the wrong time. The answer though was in the key framing and when a foot was planted down I used "translate x" to hold it in place. I did remember what Johny had told me on this matter and looked to the graph editor in terms of the walk to help correct the feet movements and holding positions. I felt the need to look to the graph editor in doing the remainder of the animation to get an idea of the key frames and undo any mistakes. This was seen when animating the crate for lifting it up.
The animation, ended the character being exhausted from lifting the crate and showing this through moving him up and down to show him recovering.
Looking back I would think this task was challenging, and most difficult in terms of the movements and positioning. There are somethings I would do differently such as the animating of the characters arms to get a better positioning and try and see if I could hold the crate in place before it was lifted up. I would think that using the graph editor whilst animating did help considerably in terms of the feet movements an in holding the crate in position. It shows that Johny's advice was sound and helped a lot.
In hindsight I should've realised the difficulties in doing this animation in Maya, however I wouldn't realise it without attempting the exercise, as this was the point of the module to see what I was good at and what was my weakness in Animation. I would think that I'd done a good attempt at the lifting heavy crate exercise despite the issues. The feedback that I would receive on this exercise would help refine it better and in the hopes that this week we learn how to make the rig hold its hands on the crate without animating them separately would be a great help in the exercise refinement.
In future I shall look into experimenting with the rig, to best see how the movements in the rig could show moving the boxes in the animation with a simple lift and put down.
Comments
Post a Comment