Final Project

Kristine Tseng 5/11/2020

Storyboard and characters

Storyboard

I wanted to make an animation about a hungry bear who goes fishing for some dinner, but upon catching the fish he is overcome by guilt and decides to throw the fish back into the water.

I came up with a scenario that I thought wouldn't be too ambitious and would be a good way to start trying to rig some characters.

Characters

I drew out some orthographic views of the characters with guidelines. I found these to be extremely helpful when modeling the characters since I could just put the drawings on an image plan and trace them.

When designing the characters I tried to make them using simple shapes so that it would be easier to model.

Bear

Fish

Animation

Final animation

I ended up not sticking very closely to the original storyboard as I was animating.

Another one

I was looking around and found out about Maya's toon shader, which I thought was kind of cool so I also made a version of the animation with the toon shader to see how it would look.

Three frames from the animation

The bear calmly fishing

Shock as the bear realizes what he has done

Pity for the fish

Problems I ran into

Rigging

This was my first time trying to rig something and I ran into a lot of difficulties, but overall I think things came together pretty well.

In this animation I rigged the bear, the fish, and the fishing pole. The fishing pole was relatively easy to rig since it was just a stick and it only bent in one direction so I didn't run into a lot of problems with that. The fish was also not too difficult since I only needed it to flop around, and its rig was just a straight line. The bear was more difficult.

Rigging the bear

When designing the characters I didn't take rigging into account. The biggest problem that I didn't anticipate with the bear was that it was too fat. Originally the entire bear was one rig, with the arms and legs connected to the spine, but when I tried to move the arms or legs they would end up deforming the entire body around the joints. I tried to paint the skin weights to limit the impact of each joint only to the area that it was supposed to affect but this did not seem to work.

What I ended up doing with the bear was creating separate rigs for each arm, each leg, and the torso, so that none of the limbs are connected to each other. This made animating it later on extremely difficult since I had to manually line everything up but I could not find any other way to do it.

Another problem was that the bear's legs were too short so there was not enough space for a knee and ankle joint. When bending the bear's legs along any joint it would deform the entire leg in a way I didn't want it to, so I ended up not using any of the leg joints. This made it difficult to animate the part where the bear gets up to a standing position from a sitting position, and the part where the bear walks, since it's hard to envision how someone would do that without bending their ankles or knees at all. I used a lot of creative liberties and camera angles to try to make it look acceptable.

Animation controllers

I also had a lot of trouble attaching controllers to the rigs. A lot of times the axes on the joints weren't oriented correctly, or moving a controller would not result in the same movement in the joint, which caused a lot of trouble during animation.

Camera angles

I heavily took advantage of camera angles and did a lot of fixing things off-camera.

Long arm

One example is the scene where the bear reaches for the fish. Too late into the animation I realized the bear's arm was not long enough to reach the fish on the ground, and the bear was also just not close enough to the fish to reach it. I didn't want to try to animate another walk cycle for the bear to move close enough, and I also didn't think the bear's arms were long enough to reach the ground anyway even if it was close enough to the fish.

The camera is zoomed very closely on the fish so you can't see how long I extended the bear's arm to get it to reach the fish. Only the tip of the bear's arm is on camera, so the long arm is not visible. I also shrinked the arm back to normal size off-camera.

Floating legs

The bear's leg's were too short for it to sit realistically, so in every scene that it's sitting its legs are not attached to the body. Its legs are also all over the place when it gets up and walks. I positioned the camera to minimize these things from being too noticeable.

Didn't want to use nCloth

I did a less good job of hiding this. Originally the fish was supposed to be attached to the fishing line throughout the entire animation. In order to create realistic string movement I tried to make the line an nCloth, but it was very difficult to coordinate it while the fish was flapping around and having it attached to the fishing pole at the same time. Also the nCloth really slowed down the playback speed and made Maya crash a lot, making animation very difficult.

To avoid these problems, I made the following changes:

Not having the fish attached to the line the entire time
Using two different objects for the fishing line and switching from one to the other off camera

Page updated

Report abuse