Dynamic Character Animation Sequence

Dynamic Character Animation Sequence
EGD335 - 3D Animation: Assignment three.
Fall 2009 – First Semester, junior year
Montreal Campus

This was the most entertaining animation project I’ve done so far. This project was to use everything we’ve learned to create a 10 second animation of a bipedal character that can pick up and drop an object. The character also had to do 5 different actions. I tried very hard to set up my character to get as much control over it as I could. I used a combination of tutorials my Art & Animation advisor created, as well as the Learning Autodesk Maya 2008 The Modeling & Animation Handbook to help me with rigging my character. I wanted my animation to be very fast paced, and have minimal pause times. Whenever I animated my character I’d think to myself “What would Jackie Chan do?” My original animation had a few hiccups in it, where the character would do some very unnatural movements that looked really weird if you watched it a few times. Excluding the jumping over the table, either my roommates or I would act out certain positions. I’d also look on youtube for freerunners or parkour traceurs to get a better understanding of the limits of movement the human body is capable of. I came into a big problem about 3/4ths of the way into animating the project, which was Gimbal Lock. Thankfully I was aware of what Gimbal lock was before I encountered it since fellow students in the past had problems with it in previous assignments. Thankfully I was able to fix it for some things on the character, but unfortunately for something like the boomerang I wasn’t able to.

The difference between this video and the one i submitted is that this video has an increased resolution and a different lighting setup. Also rendered using Mental ray.