Experiment Gone Wrong

For my first time author submission, I wanted to show how I made one of my projects for my body Mechanics class.

Desktop

Internet

Software used:

1. Blender
2. Maya
3. Photoshop

In my animation class, we have been animating this fox character for a little bit. We also did separate animations, animating the physics of bouncing balls with different weights and scales. For my animation, i wanted to incorporate both assets. I brainstormed a couple of ideas, my main hurdle was how to naturally incorporate all the balls i wanted, without making it seem forced. I eventually fell on the idea of them being created by the fox, but as always, something goes wrong, and it creates something potentially dangerous.

For almost any animation, you want to make a storyboard, especially for a longer one that tells a story. So i used Photoshop to make mine. I first start with making a rough sketch of the lasers that will create the balls, then the button that will be pushed. This process is where you get to be pretty creative, but you always have to remember there needs to be beats to your story, and it has to flow seamlessly.

The storyboard is not the final say, though; in my final animation, they do not go together exactly. If you begin animating and dont like the direction something is going, you can always change it for the better. In my animation, I wasn't able to add an explosion in the end. I wanted to keep the fox running away and hiding behind the button to give it a little more personality. If it were to just go flying away from the blast, it would be pretty funny, but I think you wouldn't connect with the fox as much.

I already have the Fox model, but since I want to be ambitious, I need to make my own lasers. I used my storyboard and brought the image into Blender. From there, I can block out my model and determine the scale I want it to be compared to my fox. I made sure to leave the model separated into specific parts, so let I could easily rig it later maya be for animating. Then i made simple platform and button out of simple privative shapes, and beveled them.

I rigged the two laser guns; they were very simple, just some simple bone joints with controls constrained to them. You never want to animate on the base geometry, as it can make it very hard to change later. The Fox rig was provided by my school. All the ball rigs were the same, just scaled up or down and given a basic texture.

You always want to start by blocking out the animation, which lets you decide your pacing and timing. I made mine really simple, in maya. Maya is great for animation, and pretty much the industry standard. I also started on a very simple fluid simulation. I wanted the first two balls that are created to fail, showing how this is a machine test, and the results are unpredictable. I did the fluid simulation in Blender, then exported them as Alembic cheche into Maya.

Once you make your breakdown, you dont want to spline and smooth out your animation with tangents right away. First, you should continue to add keyframes and make sure the weight of all your objects makes sense. Then you will move into the spline phase, which means selecting all your keyframes and turning the tangents all to spline. This smooths out all your keyframes, but it can also affect the speed and timing of your animation. So you will want to go through and clean it up after the splining.

After animating everything, I felt something was missing, so I decided to add some electric effects to my animation to give it some more flavor. I first started with the fox. The first two times the fox hits the button, the machine doesn't work, so to show he is frustrated, I used the 2D animation to give his last hit more power. It also tells the viewer why the machine breaks the way it does when it continues to spawn new balls. Eventually would spawn a possible bomb, which leads to the fox running away and ending the short. I also added some effects to the lasers themselves. I felt they needed a cue to show when and how they are creating the balls out of nothing. Some mysterious power is being used and emitted from the lasers in the form of the 3d effects.

The effects were done in Photoshop. I mainly eyeballed them and created new layers that I would insert into the frames as image planes in Maya. It was quick but effective and gives the viewer a little more perspective into the world and story you are creating.

The final animation came out quite nicely; it's quick, but tells a story, and was a great way to practice some basic animation skills like overlapping action and anticipation. I also think I used each software to its strengths, Blender for the modelling and simulation, Photoshop for the story board and 3D effects, and Maya for the animation, which it excels at.