Character Model
The most difficult part of animation was creating the character itself. Throughout the modeling process as well as the rigging process, I encountered a lot of errors and issues. Due to the character having different anatomy, the rig needed to be fixed by hand to adjust for the character’s design. In the actual narrative project, any scenes that I was assigned to animate that included my character I had to hand animate due to Motion Capture (MoCap) not working well with my character’s rig. I do like how the character’s design looks and how it overall turned out and I feel that this was a really good learning experience on how to deal with issues like the ones I faced during this project.
Character Walk & Run Animation
Once we had finished the model and textures for our character, we made them move. The character model I had made was particularly difficult to animate due to the limb structure as well as the cape. I had issues with the texture due to the UVs on the model not being there which prevented me from actually adding the texture to the character. However, through online searches, I was able to find a way to transfer UVs from one model onto another. This did however mean I had to retexture the character which is why the character in the first image is slightly different than the one in the animation below.
Along with issues with textures, some of the limbs, mostly the arms, when animated would fly about the place even though key frames weren’t there to make that movement. This didn’t appear in the walking animation and only the running one so it may have been due to the larger/faster movements that were in the running animation. My character was also not suited for MoCap as stated in the begining so I wasn’t able to do a MoCap of the character.
Lip Sync Animation
Once we learned how to rig and animate character movement, we went on to learn how to animate their facial expressions and mouth movements. It was difficult for me to animate facial expressions due to my character having such a large smile on all the time. I did manage to move certain parts of the faces such as the “eyes” and “bow” sitting ontop their head to go along with the emotion they were showing. I had a lot of fun with the lip sync animation and quite liked the voice I had chosen. (The voice is that of Satan/The Mysterious Stranger from the claymation, The Adventures of Mark Twain, who was voiced by Michele Mariana and Wilbur Vincent)
3D Senior Narrative Animation
For our senior narrative animation, my group decided to try and include all of our characters, which for the most part, all resembled monsters. Our story line was that a mantis monster was chased into the woods by an angry mob where he eventually runs into my character in a clearing. The two become friends due to their similar experiences and decide to take a walk where they eventually make it to a city. Another character, a goblin, is seen in the city running a bakery where there seem to be no customers. Eventually he goes out of business and has to close down his shop. Across the street he meets a person with a very interesting hair cut who also seems to have gone out of business. The goblin goes to talk to the person and they start to make their way to a bar. At this bar, the goblin and person meet the mantis and my character where they all have a drink and slowly become friends. Eventually they all decided to create a shop together called “Monster Munchies”.
We unfortunately did not have the time to fit in a lot of what we originally wanted to. Something I think we should’ve considered doing was using more premade models rather than creating our own which ended up taking us much more time than it should have. The motion capture for some of the movements ended up being a little rough as well but overall it was a fun experience and I enjoyed working together with my group members on it.