3D Senior Narrative Project

I worked with a group for this project, which was really fun. I got to experience working with others on an animation and splitting up the work evenly so that we’re being productive. For this project, I redesigned my character, created and painted the props (the rock and paintbrush). I also did the animation of the Bully scene, where I created and animated 3d hands, which was very difficult to figure out. I also got to use camera movement and perspective for the storytelling. I also did some of the editing, putting all of the videos together and getting the timing down. I used a bit of color grading to make some scenes more dramatic as well.

3D Character Animation

Character Design

Every student in animation designed a character from scratch, and got to create their backstory/character traits. I was influenced by a couple different animation styles but I knew I wanted to make a more nature related character, with some magic elements, which is why I made my character a woodland elf. I really enjoyed creating my character’s bio because I love character design and hope to possibly pursue it in the future.

Run, Jump, Walk Cycle

For this project, I had to create a walk cycle, a run cycle and a jump cycle for my character. I used key framing and walk/run cycle references to create my animation. I really enjoyed this project because I have practiced walk cycles before so I had more experience with this, and doing it on a 3d animation software was easy once I got a bit of understanding of how the software worked.

3D Lip Sync

For the Lip sync project I chose a song from one of my favorite animated shows, Steven Universe. I ran into a couple problems with this project. To edit the face and mouth we had to create key frames by moving vertices on the model to create certain mouth shapes that correspond to certain sounds or letters. I ran into quite a few problems with this project but I was able to figure it out and problem solve. I had some trouble with the skeleton because it wouldn’t line up properly with the model, so I had to manually create the skeleton. As well, when I was animating the lip syncing my computer crashed and I had lost all of the key frames I had. So I had to redo about 3 hours of work. I had also made the lip sync longer, however it was taking too long to render out so I had to cut it shorter.

Reflection

This project was an invaluable experience, I enjoyed every step of the process. I had the opportunity to practice rigging as well as using sliders in Maya to create the lip-syncing video. This project incited required more creative thinking, since I was attempting to express the character’s personality and emotions into their movement. I have definitely learned what to do and what not to do in future models. I want to take these skills I learned to create a more detailed model with smooth rigging.