Final Project

Problem

For this final project, I decided to take an earlier model we used in class, a simple human model created out of blocks, then rig and animate this model. I wanted to animate this model to jump several hurdles, getting experience with animating running and jumping, as well as several other poses at the beginning and end of the animation, such as the model performing several workout stretches or falling onto the ground and getting back up. Here is a link to my final Maya file.

Solution

For my approach on this project, I started by rigging the model. First, I created the skeleton, where each piece of the block man got a separate bone to control its orientation. Once I had created the skeleton, I started setting up controllers and IK handles to help with animation. I ended up adding IK handles to the legs, which, combined with the “sticky” attribute allowed me to move the root bone of the skeleton as a “center of gravity” controller, as the feet would attempt to stay in place unless I moved them directly. This ended up helping immensely when animating the model, as it prevented any issues with the feet sliding when attempting to animate the run cycle. Once this was done, I ended up setting up a few derived keys to control the spine and neck movement, as I thought this would allow me to easily control common spine movements with a single attribute. While this worked well, it had a few unintended consequences that made animation much more difficult later (see Challenges). Beyond this, I set up the arms to have IK controls, but I ended up deleting these and reverting to FK because I didn’t like the way the controls felt when moving the arms the way I would need to for the animation. Lastly, the head, wrists, and feet all had orientation controllers that let me control their rotation independent of the other controllers.

Next, I started the animation of the project. This required several iterations of my rig, but eventually I decided to just move forward with the rig that I had (see Challenges). I ended up hand keying the entire animation (I didn’t copy or paste any keyframes for the running). Ultimately I think I had to rush a bit too much for the animation, and this left a lot of the animation pretty choppy. Also, because of the challenges with my rig, I was unable to do all of the poses that I wanted to do at the beginning and end of the animation, so the animation ended up quite a bit shorter than I had intended. Overall, I think several of the poses in the animation were strong, but with more time and a more complete rig, I would be able to make a much better animation.

Images

Here are several frames from the animation showing off key poses.

Video

Challenges

This project had a lot of issues that were largely avoidable, and most of them can be summarized with “Don’t take shortcuts with rigging”. Several issues occurred with the rig, notable with my derived keys for the back and neck. These keys ended up preventing me from rotating the back and neck normally, meaning that, hilariously, I was unable to rotate the entire rig with the root controller, leading to some unfortunate limitations in what I could actually do with my final rig (but this was my fourth or fifth attempt at the rig, and I decided going forward at that point was probably for the best). Ultimately, this made animating the model WAY harder than it needed to be, leading to a lot of the cut poses and choppy keyframes in the animation.

Another challenge was with the model itself. I assumed that using the premade model would have saved me a lot of trouble, but because I didn’t pay attention to the units and orientation of the human model, when I imported it into my scene, it ended up being very large (the model was in feet, my scene was in centimeters) and pointed in the wrong direction (which was only an issue because of my rig). I eventually sorted this out, but it did waste a lot of time while I tried to figure out what was wrong, and how to fix it.

Lastly, I left myself very little time to render because of everything else, so I divided up rendering between three computers. Unfortunately, there was a discrepancy between the first computer and the other two, leading to my first 150 frames appearing darker than the last 330. I don’t know think it was a difference in my Maya settings, as I used the same scene when rendering from all computers, so I’m not sure what caused this lighting discrepancy. By the time I noticed the difference, I didn’t have enough time to re-render the first 150 frames, so I left them in while putting the video together.

I feel like I learned a lot while making this project (especially about rigging), and I think that I could improve this project significantly if I were to make it again.