Research & Self Critique

Research

For this assignment, I did some research on doing my 3D box animation. Firstly, I researched using the links to the Autodesk website provided in the lab notes where I found great helping tips and tools to aid in my progression of the assignment. Also, the previous lab exercises, especially week 13’s tutorial (which is the crane arm), were useful when I went back to read and do them again. It refreshed my memory of doing animations and made doing the assignment easier for me.

At first, I had thought that using parenting in the assignment would be enough to do the assignment. However, it wasn’t the case as there were 4 boxes in my assignment, unlike the lab practice in week 13. As a result, I was forced to change my animation style into using parent constraint and setting rest positions in the assignment. I learnt all these through my classmates and Maya videos found online.

Secondly, I tried to make the entire animation as realistic as possible. For example, when the arm is lifting the box upwards, it will move slower due to the act of gravity. However, there were some parts that I thought were not as realistic as I had imagined it should look like. I went online to find animations that looked realistic and also tried to imitate the crane arm actions in reality in order to aid my assignment in looking better.

Self Critique

The final output of my assignments did not turn out as nicely as I had expected even though I did my assignment in three different versions, with every latest version looking as realistic as possible I could make with my skills. However, I think that it is not a bad effort for me as given just a few weeks of playing around of the animations in Maya, it is a good piece of work as I placed lots of concentration and effort into the assignment.

However, there are definitely a few flaws in my assignment. Firstly, my assignment does not look realistic enough at some parts of the animation, especially during the pick-up and drop down of the second box. Other than that, I think the rest of the boxes are quite okay.

Also, the part of the animation when the crane arm finds out that there is a red box instead of the green boxes. I tried to express the feelings of the crane arm itself but it did not come out as clearly and I think this is probably because of I did not pay much attention to the detailed movements of the arm and instead I paid attention to the general movement.

Another flaw is the picking up of the boxes. Because I set had set a limit to the movement of the arm before, the arm couldn’t stretch as far to reach one of the boxes and pick it up properly. Hence, the arm didn’t pick up the box right on the middle top of the box. When the green boxes are stack on each other, the boxes’ position do not really compliment with each other, but they are stacked up on each other nonetheless.

Other than that, I think that my assignment is done quite nicely.

Assignment 2 Animation

Firstly, like in the previous exercise, I linked the joints of the crane arm together so that everything will move together when moved/ rotated (of course, the parent constraints also play a part in setting everything in position when the animation is made).

In this screenshot, the crane arm is supposed to pick up the first green box and then move it to the rectangle platform on the left. To be able to accomplish this animation, I first parented the box and the platform to fix the initial position of the box so that the box would not be appearing at any part of the maya 'world' instead 

Here, the arm is picking up the second green box. Before the arm picks up the second box, I parent constrainted the platform with the box and the arm with the box so it will be easy for me to set the pick up and release of the box. At the frame when the box is stacked on the first one, I set the rest position of the box so it will not appear anywhere in the maya world and will stay at its final position.

For this part of the animation, the box sees the red box. I wanted to make the initial reaction of the crane arm to be shock, as there is a red box among the green boxes. Then the arm will go to the other remaining green box and the first two green boxes to check the colour of them. After checking the stack, the arm will give a sigh and look back at the red box and to the stack, thinking what to do about the red box. This part of the animation is done purely by setting keyframes on the arm control and the base. No parenting or sort was needed here.

At this point, a sudden idea will pop into the crane arm and it will move the red box onto the other platform, separating from the other green boxes. Parenting(constraint) of the platform and box, crane arm and box was needed to complete this part. And the constraints were all done at the frame where the crane arm comes in contact to pick up the red box.

The only remaining thing for the crane arm to do here would be to stack the remaining green box on the stack of green boxes. After stacking the final box, the arm will return to a 'hibernation' mode. Like the other parts of the animation. I only used parent constraining(where armcontrol constrain was 1 and platform constrain was at 0) at the frame where the box was picked up. After stacking the box, I set the rest position of the box so that it will not move elsewhere after all the animation has been done. After that, the remaining part of the animation left was to make the crane arm go back to its original position. And so I set the keyframes of the arm control and base again in order to complete this animation.

Final animation output

Assignment 2 StoryBoarding

Storyboarding details

1st picture: Crane arm is stacking green boxes.

2nd picture: Crane picks the first and second green boxes up normally and set them down at designated place.

3rd picture: Crane arm sets down second green box, turns around and finds itself looking at a red box.

4th picture: Puzzled, the arm turns to look at the green boxes before turning back to the red box.

5th picture: Arm decides to pick up the red box to separate it from the stack of green boxes.

6th picture: Arm goes ahead to pick up the last green box and put it together with the other green boxes.

Week 12 Lab(3 bouncing balls exercise)

This aim of this exercise is to allow us to learn how to control the speed of three different balls falling, each of different 'weight', as assumed. The heaviest ball is on the left, followed by the middle ball and finally the one on the right. We had to set the extreme key frames of each ball and starting from there, slowly tune the speed of the ball to suit its 'weight'. The heavier ball will land first and followed by the lighter ones. Using the graph editor, I was able to control the falling and rising speed of the ball but seems to be some minor mistakes that I spotted but found it difficult to solve as the correction made to the speed is too insignificant.

This is the video of the final output of the lab exercise.

Week 13 Lab 1

Learning about inverse kinematics. We were learning about some skeleton/joint tool. Also, the IK Handle tool.  The IK handle tool is to connect a 'line' from the first to the last or designated joint so the there will be like a 'movement'. For my case, it is like an arm bending movement. I felt that this part was quite easy for me to do.

Learning about IK handle and turning on and off the layer 'mesh'. This method is to allow easier view of the skeleton and joint instead of viewing the model and the joints/skeleton altogether.

 Adding in a locator and annotation so that it is easier for us to rotate the entire crane. We learnt to use the locator and annotator tool. The locator tool is to allow easier control of selected parts of the model/ skeleton/joints. As a result, when the locator is selected, the entire arm (colored pink in the picture) will move together. The locator increases convenience during the animation process and makes it easier for me to set the key frames when everything is coordinated with each other. On the other hand, the annotator allows the user, me, to see where the locator is as the locator is marked with only a 'X' or '+' shape, which might make the locator hard to find if the grid is switched on.

Ending product. However, I am not really satisfied with the first two seconds when the box canbe seen moving up and down on its own, maybe due to the parenting/ constraints. I will try to rectify this problem and repost and new video if the problem is fixed.

Week 11 Part 2 (E-learning)

For this e-learning, the objective was to make the ball bounce as realistically as possible. There was much usage of the graph editor for this lab exercise. The ball had to bounce as if there was 'gravity' acting on the ball. The bounce rhythm had to be faster and faster because of the reality of the situation. I had to adjust the Translate Y gradient as it was the key point that controlled the falling and rising speed of the ball. The accuracy of the lab exercise had to be precise as possible so that I can gain as much experience.

Week 11 Part 1 (E-learning)

Through this e-learning part 1 lab exercise, I learnt more on how to do animations on Maya. The animation of this bouncing ball became smoother than my previous exercise with the help of the graph editor and tutorial provided. Through controlling the tangents of the key points, I was able to make my ball bounce more realistically in terms of elasticity and the 'gravity' acting on the ball.

At this part, the graph editor and smoothness of the bouncing ball is almost done except for some part where the gradients of the Translate X and Y have to be edited before running the animation. The static channel and others have yet to be deleted to make Maya run the animation run more smoothly.

The final 3 second animation of the lab exercise