Parent- child heirarchy:
A parent child hierarchy is where one object is dominant over the movement of a separate, smaller object’s movement in animation. This goes for limbs and torso’s of characters; the torso will be the parent as the limbs don’t move in a bizarre, freakish way.
To test this, we were tasked with making a rather simple character from blocks in Maya and rearranging the rotational point of the object to line up with what we wanted to be the parent object. Blocks…
I made a creeper– I don’t know why, but I made a creeper. It made me laugh and brought me great amounts of joy. Anyways, The legs and head rotate in Minecraft so I wanted to do the same here: I made all pieces separate parts and rearranged the rotation around a certain point. By using the P key I selected all parts and combined them to the parent obkect– the torso. Now? Behold my monstrosity!
He has come to consume your house in eternal flame.
character rigging:
I have had a little bit of experience with character rigs in Maya in the past– around 6-7 months ago we were creating a GameJam and made a spaceman corpse and wanted to make him do various poses. If out flour sack is not rigged with a skeleton then I will need to use rigging but no other characters show up in my short bar the flour sack.
finishing my scene:
I am convinced that my scene has been finally finished, with tweaks that can be made. I have fully structured the outer shell creating the interior of the ship, in which my animated short will take place, as well as transported a single chair and control panel and two buttons to be used during the process into the scene. Two rectangular shapes lie at the exit to the ship to resemble doors, and I plan to have a swift millisecond animation of them swinging open and throwing the protagonist and filler objects out of the airlock into the dark abyss of space.
I chose to remove one of the chairs and a steering wheel to make it less busy and so my floursack may climb up without clipping through another object or myself having to worry about that scenario. Most of my ideas will remain the same, some more ambitious sides may be cut.
I am also working on an outer model for the ship as well to display a camera change to the ship falling a 90 degree angle so our protagonist may belly flop onto the anti gravity button. This may end up being replaced to just the interior so it is easier.
animation examination:
staging was used to show the pen click and writing of the second alien who seems to be administrating or examining the alien trying to abduct the human– and failing miserably.
anticipation was used when the alien was confidently trying to impress the examiner by pressing the wrong button unknowingly.
the examiner is a jelly alien and so uses squash and stretch.
Animation project update, May 6th 2020:
Working from home has provided so many problems and difficulties with the limited tech I have to work with, things are managing to get done however slower than usually expected, this lockdown has thrown me– and presumably a lot of other people in a similar situation, off track.
My scene has encountered a very any crashes and bugs to the point I have had to rethink the use of the flour sack character, and instead use an alternative character my tutor directed me to.
However, through the bugs and thinking of the many restraints I have found myself with, I have brainstormed some new ideas. I have removed the outer faces of the polygon making up the ships interior/exterior, so the faces on the inside making the ship up are the only ones present. Whether this will work or not, I have no idea, however, this will save time, clear up the UV map a lot, and clear out of the way any faces not needing a texture and therefore removing a lot of confusion.
I encountered a problem downsizing the squirrel character as well; the problem was that when downsized, parts of the model would begin to ‘freak out’, resulting in unnaturally jutting teeth and a tail at the head of the model. My tutor had never encountered such a bizarre problem before, and so I just upscaled the scene which caused a crash (?), then removed the model, which caused the character rig to also bug and keep reappearing, then finally got the model back in the next day.
Either way, here is the camera shot which will kickstart my animated project!
my next steps:
My next moves are to texture and create a map for my scene, starting with the body of the ship, then the chair, then the control panel, using photoshop. Substance Painter has always been a pain to use in my eyes and I’ve also had some problems downloading it too.
art style:
Originally my plan was to make the ship and other objects look quite realistic, but for time’s sake and to fit in with the squirrel model, I may go with a more cartoony vibe with the art style.
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