walk cycle

                                                     animating a character walk cycle

This is my first walk cycle in 3d animation. I had previously done run cycle  in 2d using flash and it was a great experience.

Animating a walk cycle was a vigorating and challenging. The best part about this was figuring out the graph editor.

I took some reference for the walk cycle,so as to understand the key poses . Here it is below

Here is the playblast below-

                                    

                                    Thanks and comments are welcome and apprciated

Dynamic poses

   This was done as an exercise in our animation class. We had to make 5 poses taking a 3d character model.

1) reaction pose                                                                             2) Observing pose
                                    

                 

3) Looking up pose                                                                            4) Casual pose
      

                                                          5)  Punching pose

                                                         
                                                       

                                                                             

                                              

                                         

                                                            

Thanks and comments are welcome and appreciated

                                                       

Dynamic expressions

                                                             Basic expressions

This was done as an exercise in our animation class. We had to make 5 expressions taking a 3d character model.

  1)        typical serious                                                                              2) crafty     
     






3)            nervous                                                                                      4) confident
                                      
                                        
                                                                   5)   sad
                                                                  

This sad expression was inspired by laurel of the laurel hardy series.

Thanks and comments are welcome and appreciated

        





                                             

Book Rig

Rigging a Book

This was a  challenging rig, as it had lots of steps to get it done. The rig procedure is as follows-

The first part, is to rig the cover of the book by placing joints and skinning them to the cover

Then, giving joints to the book and skinning them to the book

The third part was using corrective blendshapes to position the vertices of the book and correct its shape when the book is open or closed.

Then a loose page had to be rigged and page fanning had to be created. The loose page was rigged using blendshapes to get the different positions of a page when its turned.The rigged loose page was then imported into the file to get multiple pages for the page fanning.
The page fanning was done using the midpoint formula:-
                                     
(x2,y2,z2) = 𝑥1+𝑥3/2,𝑦1+𝑦3/2,𝑧1+𝑧3/2

I had imported and used 9 pages for the fanning.

The last step was to create controls for the book rig. Here are some of the screenshots of the rig below-
                              

playblast

                                         

                                    This video shows the controls created for the book rig.

            Thank you, comments are welcome and appreciated

                                     

Bouncing ball animation

                                                        

This is my first 3d animation. I had really enjoyed doing the bouncing ball animation in 2d using flash. I felt like a little kid on a sugar high while drawing the keyframes and inbetweens and watching them play out in the final animation.
    

The first step in creating the animation was obviously studying it through a reference. So here is my reference video below

Then i drew some rough thumbnails by studying the movement of the ball to better understand how the ball bounced and how to reproduce the bounce in my animation.

While creating the animation in maya, the thing which confused me was the graph editor.But with practice i was able to make out what to control as to get the desired output.

Thanks and comments are welcome and appreciated.

                         

Elephant Toy

                                                                        Wheel Rig
        
               The task was to rig the wheels of the elephant toy to turn when the model was moved.
                                                              
                                                                      State of rest

                                    

                                                                      Stretched position

 

                                                                   Squashed position

For this rig to work, an expression was required. Therefore a formula was used to make the wheels turn when the model was moved.

An auto wheel attribute was added to the master control of the model to control the on and off of the wheel movement.

Individual controls for each of the four wheels were created for individual movement.

Then a squash deformer was added to the model for the stretch and squash feature to get a  cartoonic  appeal.

The whole model was then parent and scale constrained to the master control.

           

Classic Warfare

                                                Rigging a Classic Bow and Arrow mechanism

 The task was to rig the bow and arrow according to the rig requirements. The requirements were
 1. The bow had to bend when the strings were pulled
 2.The Arrow had to have a space to function independently, stay with the bow and stay with the string
 3.A world control was necessary for the model
  Here are some of the screenshots below-

 

The Bow was rigged first. Then the components of the bow rig were grouped together and a master control was created for the Bow rig group, and the bow group was parent and scale constrained to the Bow master control.

the Arrow group containing the parts of the arrow were grouped three times to create a spin, adjustment and transform group for the arrow to be rigged convincingly. The  Arrow control was created and the spin, adjustment and space switch attributes were added to the control.

The space switch  attribute was necessary to enable the Arrow to move freely with  the Bow and the string.

Bow and Arrow animation