Obstacle Course

EGD335 - 3D Animation: Assignment one.
Fall 2009 – First Semester, junior year
Montreal Campus

I wasn’t too excited about this project. I already knew we were going to be limited in the amount of joints we could use, and wasn’t looking forward to it. This assignment was to create an obstacle course for an object that only had one point of contact to the ground. This is pretty much the same as the assignment I did using the fire extinguisher, but our animated object needed to hop and move around things. We were required to make it do a certain number of actions, at 30 frames per second for at least 18 seconds. I didn’t feel like doing something like the fire extinguisher because it had very limited moving parts, so I went with something more complex. Pixar did such a nice job when they animated Luxo jr. because he (or she?) was able to use the weight of its head to assist it in moving around. I wanted to do the same thing and tried to mimic a small robotic arm (kind of like the arms that you see in automobile assembly lines). After figuring out how to make a nice skeleton for him only using 5 joints, I noticed I could take advantage of his claw for some nice secondary animation. The animation was supposed to be longer, but I started getting annoyed because my hierarchy of joints and controls wasn’t allowing me to do what I wanted the claw to do. I found this out during the middle of animating it and didn’t feel like going back to fix it, but I sucked it up and animated him the best I could.