Takeoff

Here's another 3D animation update. This time I've got two to put up.

The first is a box jump. The criteria was that we had to have the little character step up to and jump onto a box that was at least half his height. What came after that was completely up to us but he had to get off of the box somehow. I chose to have him launch himself off with a mighty jump. It was originally going to be that he farted and that would propel him off the box but I couldn't figure out how to optimize the particle system enough to keep render times under an hour per frame.So I got rid of it. Anyway, here it is!

...and the other animation I have is a walk cycle. We were given a new rig this time; one with arms. It proved to be quite a bit more complicated, simply because there was more parts to move. I had my guy walk to a pretty sweet beat (71 bpm) inspired by this song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJjhNqUzcPk).

He's a little jerky in places and I had some trouble incorporating overlapping action and follow-through but hey, I ran out of time. It's possible I might come back to tweak him some more but chances are slim. It depends on whether or not he'll be making it into my demo reel at the end of the year.

Here's the video:

If anyone has any comments or critiques, fire away. It really helps.

Bouncy Face Smash

Our latest assignment was to animate a little guy running up to and kicking a soccer ball.

I learned a good few things from this assignment but I think I'll start by detailing some of the technicalities.

This animation (and the stair stepper) was made entirely using 3DS Max. I used the Mental Ray renderer with all global illumination and final gathering turned off. This eliminates shadow flickering in the animation caused by the final gather solution and prevents the increased render time from the global illumination.

I opted instead for manual lighting which was very basic in this scene, simply because the focus was on animation and because I've already been sitting here 4 hours after class has ended. Doing so meant that there would be no flickering (because final gather was turned off) and render time was lessened considerably (apparently the mental ray ambient occlusion map is less demanding than global illumination).

All of the materials that I wanted to have ambient occlusion had an instance of the mental ray ambient occlusion map attached to the ambient color slot. To allow this, the ambient and diffuse colors have to be unlocked from each other. I then added an omni light in the scene that produced only ambient lighting (no diffuse, no specular) and turned the intensity down to about 0.5. The sun is just a simple targeted spot light with an intensity of around 1. Also! in the ambient occlusion map, the "light" color was changed to a deep, warm yellow and the "dark" was a dark burgundy. This added an overall warm tone to the scene. The highlights are never stark white and the shadows are a deep red instead of straight black.

...for those that were interested.

As far as things learned go (looking at it again a day later), bright green is a BAD color to use for a ground. Heck, even a medium gray would've worked better.

Number 2 is that I need to save a LOT more often. What I have posted is my second attempt because I lost everything in my first attempt because of a program crash.

A reiteration of what we've learned before is that a sense of weight comes from holds at the low positions and extra time to move upwards, in effect lessening the time it takes to fall, over the span of the motion. The angle of the hips really helps the effect as well although it's much harder to implement.

Stairmaster

So we're in the beginning of a new school year and I'm now in my second and last year of animation.

One of our classes is 3D animation and we received our first assignment which was to animate a little ball guy walking up a flight of stairs. This was my first 3D walk cycle.