3D CGI Character Animation
For this week we had been given a brief requiring us to complete a basic walk on Maya to develop our ability to work with a 3D CGI character model. Before starting this course, I was familiar with sculpting on Maya, however, I had never animated on it before so I knew before going into this project that I would struggle. To help me with the animation process, I looked for tutorials on YouTube, I used the video below to assist me.
The character we had been given to animate was a zombie character, to get a better understand of HOW a zombie would walk I looked at the clip below from AMC's show 'The Walking Dead'. I was able to take some notes from the clip, as shown below, however The Walking Dead has a very realistic vision on zombies, unlike my vision, therefore in my notes I added some movements that were not in the show (e.g. arms sticking forward). I done this because the zombie character we had been given has a friendlier atmosphere so I wanted to make his movement as dramatic and animatic as I could.
When I opened up my zombie rig, this is what the character looked like, on the left. Using my notes from above, I started to changing his form and posture to give him some personality.
Just like I had mentioned in my notes, I put the arms reaching out from the zombie's body to make him look more 'dramatic' when he walks. I also rotated his hands so his palms were facing the ground, I done this to make his hand look limp and lifeless.
After positioning the arms and hands, I took to creating the bad posture of my zombie. I curved his back inwards to himself but made sure to have his head facing forwards to foreshadow him walking to a destination.
Initially, in the beginning I struggled because I had never done animation in Maya before, however, after understanding the hot keys for animating (pressing S after moving a joint) I started to really enjoy animating. When animating I focused on only 3 parts of the zombie (hips, left leg, right leg), this was because these parts of the body are the primary actions when walking making them the most important, however in future I will animate the secondary actions now that I am more comfortable with Maya.
After I had finished animating, I rendered the zombie 5 times with 5 different perspectives, the brief had only asked for 4 but I decided to get 5 to give a better understanding of the zombie's movements. Using what I had learnt from our pixilation project, I put the images from the renders into Adobe Premiere Pro to make them play as a video, then exported them as MP4 videos. After I had exported all 5 perspectives and saved them individually, I edited them all together to make it easier to find all 5 perspectives. This process was fairly easy for me, I am comfortable with using Premiere Pro for editing. The gallery on the right shows some screenshots from this process.
The video below shows my completed walk cycle in 5 different perspectives (top, left, right, front, behind). Overall, I do like how the animation had turned out, the slowness of the walk and the position of the body captivates that this isn't a normal person which is what I wanted to achieve. If I could go back and change anything it would be to make the step at the end more fluid, the movement of the leg looks stiff and almost robotic. However, if I were to do another character animation on Maya in the future, I would be able to understand the software a lot more and avoid the mistakes I made in this project because of what we have learnt.