Telling Tales: Animating

For the last week I have been getting on with animating my character in Maya and I have to say that I have found this section of the project a lot easier and a lot less stressful than the other parts, simply because I have enjoyed animating and how easy it is to animate in Maya. Lauren and I had both decided to take 6 panels each of the storyboard and I was to animate all the panels with my character in them, however, this meant that Lauren would have more to animate so I took the last two panels of her character and was given 11 seconds of her character to animate too.

As I said I found animating in Maya very easy to do and I even found animating the camera easy to do too, so I was able to get all of the animation done in a week. This has left me with more time to work in post, as I will have to put in the pupils. The only section of the animating I found slightly difficult was Lauren's character, as I had to try and match the same style of animation. However, this was extremely difficult, as Lauren didn't actually provide me with any of her footage to watch, so instead I sat for over an hour watching YouTube videos of babies walking.

In the end this is the footage I decided to use as reference, as it had all the elements I needed for my reference. Without having Lauren's footage and no access to any of her footage, I had to go ahead and animate the character as I would have done if it were my own and hope for the best. I wasn't too happy about this, but I did my best. 

Throughout animating I conducted a render test to test all of the textures and to see how the character moved in the environment and I felt that they were all working well together so I continued to animate and work towards a finished piece. 

A compilation of all of my render tests

Overall, I am really pleased with my animation and I feel that I have managed to pull the project around and work really well towards an end piece. I am really pleased with how efficiently I was able to animate in Maya and how simple I found it. Hopefully post will go just as well.