Exercise 11: LowMan Stairs Animation (Character Animation)

 


If this video won't play here for some reason you can see it Here in a new window (It's 1080p hd there).

    
    For this week's exercise I decided to use lowMan and to animate him walking up the stairs. I also included camera animation using a motion path to attach the camera to a curve. I am pretty happy with this, it took some time but it looks pretty good. I created everything else besides LowMan using NURBS Planes and NURBS Cubes. I also added lights but that will be shown better in the next part of the post.

Animation/Scene Setup 
    Below I will include images which should provide enough information about the setup and placements of my lights, camera and curve.



Animation
    For the animation I moved various body parts but some of them were more subtle like the head movement and the slight leaning as he makes his way up the stairs. I also moved his arms so they would sway and I turned the hips so they would turn a little as they normally would, though I may have exaggerated it a little here. The feet were one of the most important parts of the animation, at the start of the animation I gave LowMan a slow start. It seems that when people aren't in a rush to go anywhere that they tend to go up the first step or two a little slower than they will go up the rest once they hit their stride. This animation looks pretty good in my opinion. 

    Below I will include 2 rendered images from the animation:


Final Project
    I am currently thinking of combining my butterfly with my dinner table scene, but if that does not work out then I will create a simple scene with some flowers/plants for the butterfly to land on and fly around in. Regardless of which idea I ultimately decide on, there will be some nice lighting and camera animation as well as animation for the butterfly. I will provide storyboards and documentation in the next post.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Classmate Midterm Reviews

 Everyone's projects were great and interesting but for this week's assignment I will look at  Tyler Getz's midterm project and Alex Lubeck's Midterm . Tyler Getz's Midterm This looks pretty cool, I like the animation that is there so far and the lily pads are nice. It would be nice to see some textures and to see the green frog get a face of some sort. The water would like really nice if it were textured and animated too, but depending on the look you are going for that may not be necessary, but ripples in the water would make sense. The character/frog animation can be improved by further exaggerating the squash and stretch. It may make it seem a bit more cartoonish if it is exaggerated a lot but it is already more abstract so I think it could work for this. Additionally, the animation can be improved by making the lily pads dip a bit down into the water from the impact of the frog landing on it. Alex Lubeck's Midterm  The snowmen models are cute, I like the w...
Read more

Exercise 1: Creating an object using only geometric primitives (Maya)

Image
          For this first exercise I decided to make a simple pepperoni pizza. I used the geometric prism, flattened it and stretched the point to make the base of the pizza, then I squished multiple spheres to make the pepperoni slices, and finally, I used a cylinder which I scaled and stretched to be the pizza crust.        I decided to also include the four different views of my model above.
Read more

Exercise 5: Tea Pot Model

Image
      This is the rendered view with some lighting I did for my tea pot model. This model was made out of 3 main parts, the lid, spout, body/base, and handle. The body and lid were made by creating a unique curve and revolving around it to get a 3D shape, small adjustments were made to the curve to get the shapes seen here. The handle was made from a partial and modified NURBS Torus and the spout was made from an edited NURBS cylinder.      Here is the 4 view layout with the Outliner. I added some lights and a plane to act as the floor. 
Read more