For our animation narrative, we animated short Action/Reaction videos with the 3D characters we made last semester. To animate the characters, we used the Human IK tool in Maya as well as motion capture data and keyframed (manually done) animations.

Here is my action/reaction project. Poppy the pug is getting ready for a picnic with her best friend, Chaad the Chihuahua, and her favorite food is sushi.

Exercises

Walk Run Jump Animation

I animated this using keyframes only, and rendered it with Arnold renderer so it looks nice.

Lip Sync Animation

I used Blend Shapes to create smooth lip syncing.

Motion Capture Animation

We downloaded pre-made motion capture data from Mixamo and Rokoko library to apply to our characters. Mine is really cursed because my character isn’t exactly human-shaped, so the shape was distorted a lot.

Reflection

From doing all of this 3D animation, I can really appreciate how technically-involved 3D animation is. I used to think that 3D animation was easier because you didn’t have to draw a thousand frames, but from 3D modeling to rigging to animating, 3D animation is really hard and you need to really understand the technology. I personally do not really understand the technology because Maya is such a huge program. People in places like Pixar or other film studios have to know how to use this tech and also code their own if they want to add a new effect, so it’s definitely very difficult.