Antici.... pation!

I've tweaked around some more with the ninja animation that I made and uploaded to the final blog post. I have prolonged the anticipation and added 1 or 2 more poses near the beginning so he turns and looks around before he notices his off screen attacker. I have also made a few changes to his leg movement just before he takes off, so it is closer to his body, emphasising how his legs dramatically take off as he leaps across.

Ninja

I've just finished a piece of character animation that I'm quite pleased with so far, which involves a ninja landing on the ground and flipping across the ground to dodge spinning stars. Those of you who have the book How to Cheat in Maya 2010 may notice that this animation has a striking similarity to the animation in the chapter on Blocking. This is because I used that tutorial, as well as the character rig and scene provided as references to make my own animation; but I did make my own animation from scratch, without using the actual scene files provided on the DVD.

It took me about 2 days to complete it; I think it looks ok so far but I think I need to have a play around with the timing in some areas, such as the beginning where I think he goes into the leaping pose too quickly and I could prolong his anticipation before the first star is thrown at him.

Let me know what you all think.

Getting back into character animation

Been playing around with a few techniques from a book called How to Cheat in Maya and trying to concentrate on my character animating once again. Here's something I put together today.

Meet Bob

Over the past few weeks, I've been working at character modelling; as well as designing and rigging. For my next personal project, I decided to design my own character and model/rig it in maya.

I decided to use a character called Bob that I made up for a live action film project that I was working on about 3 years ago, but didn't really get underway because I couldn't find any actors. Here is a character design that I drew up so I could model Bob in Maya.

He is a boy of around 15 who is quite self-absorbed and lives an isolated existence in a garden shed. I used this sketch as the actual reference in Maya, so I could model the character.

I am pretty pleased with how the body turned out and I feel I managed to make a model that closely resembles the reference sketch that I drew up.

I managed to model his body in a day, but where I started having trouble was the head, which ended up taking about a week, because I kept having to redo it and I haven't quite got the hang of deleting edges to create a more organic shape.

After a few tries, I finally managed to model the face and then extrude the shape of the head, as well as delete the various edges to give it the smooth look.

I then textured the character and modelled his eyes, and gave them controls, and I also modelled and textured his hair. I then rigged the character and put in various controllers and locators.

I'm quite pleased overall with the character model, although i think he is very slim and a bit rigid at the sides. I'm also not completely satisfied with his head, as it still just looks like a polygon. His eyes work ok, but I still need to insert eyelids and also I need to learn about controls to make the mouth move.

One thing which I am glad about is that I managed to rig him successfully and I managed to do it mostly without using a tutorial, so I think I've acquired a basic knowledge on rigging (which I'll need to practice)

When I've finally mastered this rig, I might post him up so you can download and I'll also post up some animations.