IMM211: Animation 1

 So, keeping things going with my midterm project, the Yume Nikki bedroom scene. In my last post, I walked about the textures that I was working with, and trying to get the scene to look much more natural than it currently does. Since then, I have started to get a bit of camera animation going. Right now, all the camera does is move around the room, and then focus on the desk, but I want to work towards getting it to be much smoother. I have keyframes at the 1st 30th, 60th, and 120th frames, but as you can see below, it still looks a bit fast for me. I could slow the animation down independently, but that would lower the framerate, which I do not want to do, so I will likely just add more keyframes. Hopefully soon I will be able to get some lighting down as well, and put down some images on the desk for the viewer to look at once the animation ends. In the future I may also add some other objects in the room, such as maybe a player model.

 Last week, I was focused on building the bedroom from Yume Nikki, out of NURBS models. I created most of it, enough to get the gist. But the scene needed textures to really come to life. So, I ripped most of the colors that I will be using directly from the game itself, while taking a few liberties. I added an image onto the rug, to make it look like the rug in the game, and I would definitely like to do this on the walls as well, and maybe add some image textures to make it loo similar to the game. Hopefully, I plan on creating some camera animation, and adding a few more lights and flat images onto the scene to bring it to life a bit more.

 This week, we had to make a slightly more complex NURBS model. I decided to recreate the bedroom from a game that I like, Yume Nikki. I modeled everything out of basic shapes, so hopefully you can kind of grasp what I was trying to get at. (I made walls too, but I hid them to show a better view.) The scene would definitely benefit form some textures, though, which I'm going to go into in the next post!

Continuing off of last weeks post, we had to add character to our bouncing ball animations from last week, using colors and textures. As I mentioned last week, I had already gotten the squash and stretch to work reasonably well. Next, I added the face texture for the ball, and rotated it into the correct position. I then added the texture to floor and ring, to create a colorful scene. Lastly, I added a light to give the scene a spotlight. Rendering was a bit confusing. I eventually got it to render as an .avi file, though. The file turned out to be about 122MB though, which I thought was HUGE for a 2 second video. I ended up compressed it to a smaller file size myself outside of Maya (in order to post it here) but I would love to know what made the video so large to begin with! The techniques I've used so far seem to be most of the key animation techniques, in Maya, and everything else just builds off of that. I can't wait to see what else we can do! EDIT: These were my render ...

This week, we had to create a simple bouncing ball animation. The initial step, getting the ball bouncing, was pretty easy. The textbook tutorial was fairly easy to understand, all that was involved was creating all of the primitives and a few well-placed keyframes. This is the animation without any "character" added to it. The next part of the assignment was to add "character" via colorful textures and squash and stretch. The goal was to make the ball look less like a ball and more like it's own character, hopping up and down. Adding a squash handle and getting it to work right was a bit tricky, but it was fun to play around with it once I figured it out. Just getting it to just bounce was easy, so I added a little front-and-back wiggle for extra character. The demo just had a constant forward-facing wiggle, but I thought the back-and-forth looked a little better and more natural. Next, was to add textures and render, which I will get to in the next post!