Project 6 - Final Animation

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Project 6 Final Animation

Friday, December 12 2025

Description

The Forest for the Trees is about a fly who gets stuck in the web of a hungry spider. The fly becomes so focused on coming up with creative solutions to escape the web that it doesn't realize it can easily fly out of it. In the end, the fly (and spider) end up right where they started.

Storyboards

There are a couple of differences between the storyboards and the final version of the animation. The spider does not go onto the web in the animation, and frame 11 is not in the animation.

Animation

Frames

The animation opens with a fly moving through a cloudy forest. The fly model is attached to a motion path here.

The spider pulls out a knife and fork after it has caught its meal. I hid the knife and fork models behind the spider's legs and also keyframed their visibility attributes so they would not appear early.

The fly weighs down the web with rocks. I used a deformer and adjusted it to stretch the lower half of the web more than the upper half.

Project Notes

Some of the models and textures used in this animation were downloaded from the internet and I cite them at the bottom of this web page.
The trees in the animation were generated using a Maya Paint Effects brush.
I rendered this animation using the Maya Hardware renderer (as I did not have enough time to render with the Maya Software renderer) and the quality is not the best.
The camera shots were made by creating and keyframing a camera.
I put the rendered frames together and added text and transitions in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Models Used

I downloaded the following models for free from Sketchfab. In order of appearance:

"Spider Web" (https://skfb.ly/6WT9D) by FeartheDeer is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"Knife and Fork (low poly)" (https://skfb.ly/oWIoD) by Adventure Dude is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"Leaf Pick Up" (https://skfb.ly/6SKTS) by vildurr is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"Stick" (https://skfb.ly/6WOXJ) by kayra23 is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).

Websites Consulted

For help editing a curve:

https://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2026/ENU/?guid=GUID-DE75D48F-D548-49CE-B04E-18E8B0C902C2

For help modeling an environment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3K-gD-GINA&t=2s

For help modeling the fly's wings:

https://acrobat.wonderhowto.com/how-to/model-leaf-maya-0125065/

For help making a motion path for the fly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8heGT9gfuVo

For help combining keyframed and motion path animation for a single object: