Learn to Fly Contest Submission

Hi im Kalin, i take a 3d animation class at my high school and my teacher informed me about this project and told me i should enter

for this project i used Maya, and the free version of z-brush

when i found out about this contest i was working on trying to create a penguin from the movie Penguin's Memory: A Tale of Happiness, and since i already had the penguin molded i decided to base my animation off the flash game Learn to fly

i sculpted the penguin's body and feet in ZBrush then took them over to Maya and combined them. I'm not really good at rigging and only know the basics so the character's rig is pretty simple, for the face I had this idea about being able to move the eye white so I could make some basic eye shapes. to do this I used shrinkwrapping and delta mush which to be honest I barely understand how they work so I'm surprised it worked at all. for the eyes I wanted them to be able to change and I used PNG images. but since I used PNG's maya decided it hated my project. it was so much work to get the eyes to work, honestly not worth it. if I could go back I would have just modeled shapes for the eyes

I started by modeling my scene based off a screenshot of the intro, I and when texturing it I drew lines on the background to make it look like the reference. unfortunately I forget to add the chords coming from the computer

the animation for this part was pretty simple, but my crappy face rig does make it kind of time consuming, the whole time im animating the face i have to keep the render view open so i can make sure it looks right.

im not to good at modeling but i tried my best, i was going for a simplistic vibe and was kinda going for the style of this show i used to watch as a little kid

i managed to finish the intro scene before winter break started so i archived my scene and sent it to my home computer. For some reason i couldn't get my janky face to work on my home Maya so i just decided to animate what i could and finish what was left when break was over

After procrastinating for way to long i realized i was running out of time to get this done and with eight days left i started animating. My goal for the first part was to recreate the scene from the flash game where the penguin stomps out his door. I got the timing down for the door and animated the penguin, to make sure my character actually looks like there walking and not just gliding across the scene when i animate a walk i make the walk cycle first, then put a cube behind the lead foots heel, then i move the character so there heel is always touching the cube until they lift there foot. repeat a few more times and you have a pretty good walking animation

when i was animating my walk cycle i messed up and the character kind of slows down, instead of going back and fixing it i just decided to go with it and added some of his mail falling out of the mailbox and having him look over at it, adding some more weight to the door falling. once i thought it was good enough i moved on to the next part, having him walk up to the ramp and peer down it

i animated the penguin putting on his glider, this took me a sec as i had to resize the glider and reanimate this part a few times, i added some camera shake when he stepped cause i thought it looked cool.

i animated him diving down and into the sky and i decided to cut it there as i was running out of time and i didnt want this to take forever to render and edit, i went back and fixed some stuff, adding camera shake to the door hitting the ground cause it looked good

while my plan was to come back to school and animate another scene before rendering my project the weather had other plans and for the first week back from winter break we only attended one day, during this time i was incredibly worried i would not finish rendering in time for the submission

thanks to the apocalyptic weather i only had two days to render so i do so at 720p. i managed to get it rendered the day of and I downloaded the intro scene from the learn to fly game and took some sound effects and clips to add to my scene. the sound effects are really bad but i only had a view hours left to submit to i was just trying to get it done

this contest was really fun, but if i had to go back and redo it i would definitely change how i did the face rig, as it was way more complicated then it needed to be, i would also go back and manage my time better, trying to get this project submitted on the last day stressed me out so much. and in the end I saw a bunch of mistakes that I just did not have time to fix. but still I'm glad I participated

heres another link to the video thingy just in case : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1w2_ZVRImXmcnhKKTFHUwpqR_ZXh5Z5UR/view?usp=sharing

https://youtu.be/YFyJ8IYVvb8