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.