In animation, I designed a 3D character called iron man, who is a man that is made out of iron. The first step in making this character was to build the character using shapes in Maya. Then, this model was turned into zBrush, where the sculpting was done for iron man’s clothing. After that the character was exported into substance painter, where I added the textures like fabric and iron.
For the character 3D animation, I exported the character’s base model alongside the colored textures back into Maya for animation. I used reference images for the walk and run cycles, and set the body part positions accordingly.
For the 3D character lip sync animation, I cut out mouth holes in my character, then assigned a shape behind the mouth to be animated to create the effect of opening and closing lips. I assigned keyframes to the shape and then matched every lip shape with the different vowels. I synced my character to the singing tiny tim’s tiptoe through the tulips.
For the narrative animation project, we were tasked with creating a 3D animated short story with group members. At first, our group had to create an animatic, which was basically a rough animation of our 3D production. We made the animatic in Adobe photoshop, and focused on sketching out important movements like which characters were moving/in the background.
Our group narrative animation was about our characters exploring a haunted house. One of the most difficult parts of the animation process in Maya was rendering the animation. Because our animation featured a pitch black room, the traditional Arnold render didn’t work. As a result, Mr.Cho helped us figure out a manual rendering method, which turned out perfect for our animation.
Overall, the narrative project was very helpful as it got me used to professional level 3D animation software that is used in major animation companies. I learned specific processes like the 3D animation pipeline, from modeling to coloring to rigging and animation.