Introduction:
In this week’s blog post, I’ll be going through my animating and render process for the first twelve scenes of my animation, explaining the problems I faced and how I managed to solve them. Lastly, I’ll be listing my personal objectives that I set myself to complete by next week.
This Week’s Task:
To start off this week, I began with animating scenes 1-12. As my deadline is only around the corner, I dedicated only so much time to each scene in terms of animating. I didn’t want to fall into the habit where I perfect the first few animations and having to rush the remaining animations.
Animation:
Before animating, I went into the animation settings and made sure my default in tangents were set to “Flat”, and my default out tangents were set to “Stepped”. This method of animating worked for me as I found it easier to animate.
Next, I made sure that I wasn’t able to select any geometry, making sure I don’t move any objects by accident. Furthermore, it helped me select the controls I wanted as I didn’t need to de-select any geometry.
When animating my character rig, i began animating with the main controls (the controls in the middle of the body), and i would then animate the remaining controls afterward, such as the elbows, wrist, and foot.
After animating the character’s body, I would then animate the character’s facial expression. This was because the timing of the facial expression depends on the movement of the character.
Whenever I set keyframes for any controls, the character wouldn’t move until it reached the end keyframe. This was because of the animation preference I set at the beginning. Once I finished setting the keyframes, I would go into the animation graph editor to convert my keyframes from “Step” tangent keyframes to “Plateau” tangent keyframes. This would now allow me to preview the animation in my viewport.
Depending on if the scene consists of camera movement or if my character is traveling a certain distance, I was required to keyframe the Spot Light’s intensity so that it kept the same level of lighting on the character. So if the character was moving further away from the camera, I would have to increase the light’s intensity.
A few scenes required my character to walk. Therefore I went onto Youtube to find a tutorial on how to animate a walk cycle. The tutorial allowed me to animate my character walking, meaning all i had to do is duplicate the keyframes multiple times to create the cycle.
By the time I duplicated the keyframes, I realised I could have used the pre & post infinite cycle buttons to create the cycle itself. This was noted for the next time i need to animate a cycle.
The last thing for me to do was to create and attach a motion path. I parented the motion path to the character’s main control, allowing the character the walk among the path.
Problems I Faced:
Well, the original problem I faced during these animations was when I attempted animating the walk cycle myself. I was running into many problems and everything just seemed off and time-consuming. I faced minor problems among the way but they just boiled down to me not being familiarised with the character rig as of yet. However, I managed to climb over those hills.
How I Solved The Problem(s):
As I mentioned before, I used a YouTube tutorial to help me figure out a way of animating a walking cycle which was efficient.
Rendering:
After animating scenes 1-12, I was ready to begin my rendering for the first portion of my animation. I chose to render via my university’s remote access as their machines were faster and it allowed me to continue animating through my PC in Maya.
The first thing I did once I opened up my scene was head into my render settings, making sure it rendered as a PNG sequence and in HD_1080. I also had to double-check if it was rendering out the right amount of frames.
Next, I was ready to render my sequence. I wanted my scenes to be easy to locate; therefore, I made sure it rendered in specific locations.
After viewing my renders I realised the appearance seemed different. This was because I forgot to re-locate certain materials to their correct textures. This happened to the material that had a custom texture. To solve this, I went into the File Path Editor to re-assign all custom materials at once.
Problems I Faced:
One problem I faced was that Maya kept crashing whenever I opened up a scene. This occurred when I was ready to render my first scene via remote access.
How I Solved The Problem(s):
To solve this issue, I browse through forums to see if people were experiencing the same problem with Maya 2022.3 version. Fortunately for me, people had experienced these problems before and provided their solutions to fix them. The solution that worked for me was that I needed to untick the “Execute script modes” box whenever I open up my scene.
Objectives For Next Week:
- Animate scenes 13-24.
- Render scenes 13-24.