Thought I'd share one of the project I worked on this past year!
For this project, we were divided into groups, and the idea was to create a few little sting animations for a company of our choice. My group decided to go with YouTube! The reason was, really, that chosing something like YouTube would allow us to go whatever direction we wanted, as you can find... just about anything there.
There were four people in my group, and we decided to have a few little animations with characters interacting with the YouTube logo. In the end it worked out with each of us designing a character for ourselves, while the artist in our group, Han Davies, took the designs, made a few modifications, designed the colours, then modelled and textured the characters!
My character is the screaming blobby dude you see above.
Once we had the finished models, we each set about rigging, skining and animating. Below you can see Barney's deformation test after he was properly skinned and rigged.
Barney's rig is probably the best one I've done so far, and had a few cool firsts for me, like stretchy legs, a stretchy spine, and simple blendshapes for blinking. And also FK/IK switch for the arms and IK legs, which I had done before. But it has issues as well! Aside from probably deserving a bit more TLC in the skinning department, and maybe some blendshapes for some extreme poses, I should have put in an extra foot bone. As it is now, he only has a hip, knee, and foot. Which means that as you move his hips around, the foot will get a bit of rotation from the hips, aaand as a consequence, the bottom of his feet kind of move as well, which isn't ideal! Normally you'd want to be able to keep them still and planted. :) You can see what I mean on the deformation test. I only really realized it was an issue when time came to render, and I found his feet kept sinking into the floor as they rotated!
Here is the final animation. Aside from the music, we did the sound effects ourselves. I should also note that Han is also repsonsible for the lovely lighting setup! :) I am pathetic atlighting and rendering myself.
Even though I still quite like it, and I had a lot of fun, I think the animation has a few issues. A lot of them can be blamed on poor time management! I spent far too much time trying to rig and skin him, and ended up with little time to actually do the animation. Also, the scene ended up needing more time than anticipated, but since I didn't want to pass the 20 second mark, I sort of just had to... squeeze things in. Which made it come out a bit rushed, maybe!
I'd rather like to revisit this animation after I turn in my final assignments at Uni and polish it up, fix some poses and some mechanical movements, and give the actions the time they need to unfold! I probably won't be going back to the rig though. :)
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