I had planned on blogging a lot more during this project to show how I was progressing..but that didn't happen. I will get better at that in time!
For this project, I decided to find a working rig that I could use for my animation. I wanted to try my hand at animating in Maya and decided that finding a rig would allow me to concentrate more on my animating skills, especially as this was the first time I was using Maya.
I downloaded the 'Eleven' rig from 'The Eleven Rig Blog' for this animation. It's a really good rig to work with in Maya and I had a lot of fun animating him in this project.
Initially, I found it quite difficult to navigate around Maya - I wasn't familiar with the controls, so it took me a while to get used to it, but after playing around with the navigation menus and messing around with the rig to see what all the controls did and how they worked, I started to get the hang of it. With this project, I also decided that I wanted to try and block out my animation first and then smooth it out later, rather than working in smooth splines right from the beginning, so that I can get used to this process with character animation. A few times whilst I was animating (probably while switching between computers), I accidentally managed to switch from stepped to spline keys as well.
With the blocked animation, I noticed that the movements seemed a lot more fluid in the second half of the animation and timed slightly better. Some of the movements in the first half seem a little rushed and possibly slightly jittery - I want to go back and try and smooth out the movements so that they seem more fluid and natural. When animating the second half, I was much more aware of keying in the start and end positions and then timing and keying in the inbetween positions - which was very important when it came to converting the stepped keys to spline, as this stopped hands floating through the table and through the character's body and lots of spinning body parts...
I've also learnt with blocking out the animation first that I need to leave a lot more time than I originally thought I needed to smooth out the movements, particularly for the first half of the animation! I think if I had managed my time a little better, I could have worked on smoothing out the animation a lot better so that all the movements were as natural as possible, without some of the snappy movements that I am aware are still in the animation.
I had a few problems in Premiere Pro as well. When I exported out my animation, the audio clip seemed to be out of sync from the video, even though the lip sync was fine whilst I was editing my clips together. I didn't realise at the time that Maya had rendered my animation as 30fps, which meant that as I was editing in Premiere Pro, my composition settings were wrong, which was why the lip sync was out when I exported the file out.
I'm going to fix this when I get back to my computer, as I'm currently working on a laptop that doesn't like to open Premiere Pro before it crashes and burns.
Overall, I am really happy with this project! I've really enjoyed working in Maya and animating the characters. I definitely want to try and complete the whole sketch over summer, as I had to cut down a considerable amount to make sure I finished my work in time for this deadline, but for now have a little look at my animation!
Character And Narrative from Rachel Man on Vimeo.
