I chose to do my short story on the annoying insect prompt, I think this was the hardest (other that lifting) that I did just because of the movement the rig makes, jumping and twisting.
I was going to add the fly in 2D and sound but due to time restraints I was unable to .
This is my Maya lifting animation, it went well until the rig had to pick up the second box, the relationships broke the arm key frames and I couldn’t fix it within the time I had.
This is the first part of the dynamics animations. This is the first of the three which will be pushing, pulling and lifting. In this animation Bucket Kid is meant to be pushing a large stone, I scaled up a cube to represent this.
Here is the bar sheet.
And the final animation
I would have added more shaking to the arms showing the strain but I couldn’t find a joint that made this visible in some of the poses, I used the arm twist or the shoulders but sometimes it didn’t make a visible difference.
This is my sneaking bar sheet, I found this one more enjoyable than the others surprisingly. I think it’s because it was more open, you could make the any sort of sneak you wanted, fast or slow. I went with a slow sneak as it would let me really experiment with subtle movements and holds.
This is the final outcome
This is the walk for Maya, I followed a tutorial on Lynda to learn how to space my steps.
I found that this is slightly rough and jagged, I would go back and improve this if I have time to. This was easy to do once I knew how to do the first steps, adding rotation to hips and arms with a light bounce on the root. I think that the stepping of the feet isn’t smooth.
For the exercise ‘Airshow’, I first planned out the basic movements using bar sheets.
I then went on to create the animation in Maya.
Unlike my previous tests with the Bucket Kid rig I used only IK modes on the arms as I found it more suitable to keep the arms in place when he’s leaning on them. I also used tried to add more holds to make the timing more believable. I did find the when used the IK arms, the hands would sometimes become jittery. The rotation in the graph editor would be very fast and make the hands snap, I corrected this in the graph editor.
From reference videos that where taken I used the Bucket Kid rig to try and translate that reference into Maya. The three references, sit to stand; sitting on floor to stand and lifting a leg all show the way we change our centre of gravity. I am also using these tries to test out the rendering using the Maya software.
I have made 6 different poses’ happiness, saddness, fear, anger, disgust and achievement.
I sketched out these first, then posed then in Maya using the bucket kid rig and also posed them with the armature.
I found bucket kid easy to pose, the only thing that I found hard was the proportions sometimes made it clip into the body. I also found some of these poses are lacking life, I want to redo them into more expressive poses.
I also tried using cameras in Maya, I used this to create 360 turns of the poses.
I was excited about learning the rigs, first we went through the Bucket Kid rig in Maya, learning how to select the bones only and pose the model. Then we where shown how to use the armature, how to start off and the magnets you need to make the armature to stand. Joe also showed us some stop motion puppets.
Artistic License 