Technical Summary

Technical Summary

 

I created a very basic character in a Maya, as the module focuses most on the character animation. The character is technically fairly simple also. I modelled the scene first, which includes grass using a Maya fur effect and some plant pots made simply from polygons. There is also a garden hose which is made using a helix, which I textured green and white, and a tap which I box modelled using an online tutorial.

 

The character was modelled after and fits into the scene. It moves using a rig which consists of a spine and individual joints for each petal. The petals can be moved together using manipulators which use set driven keys, so they can bend together backwards or forwards. This was particularly difficult as I had to paint the weights of each individual petal so that they wouldn’t affect the movement of each other. Setting driven keys was very useful for animation, and even though setting it up was complex it made animating the movement of the petals much smoother and overall it looked better. I originally tried to use bend deformers but it meant I couldn’t move all the petals at once and I

couldn’t use them individually.

 

I decided to keep it simple with the hands as they didn’t require much movement outside of a stretch, so they are controlled by bend deformers. Overall I thought this worked quite well as it made keyframing easy.

 

I am slightly disappointed that I wasn’t able to stretch my technical skill to the limit, but I know that I have problems with Maya sometimes and I find working it out difficult, so I decided to make it simple, easy to animate and just generally more effective.

 

Done