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[3dbmatt]

WEEK 09 - Nov 22nd

Final Assessment - Interaction & Speech

After returning from the mid-semester break all work was dedicated to learning how to make a 3D model speak, some camera work, rapid rigging and how to animate speech. After all of this was taught, I spent majority of my time juggling this assessment with other very large assessments and getting my character to interact with an object, and lip sync to a sound clip. I prioritized the interaction animation first as I thought it would probably be the one that takes me the longest as I found the set up and preparation for the speech animation was reasonably easy. Naturally I had a bit of trouble with skin weighting as it isn’t very responsive and doesn’t always do what you want it to do. Eventually after a lot of tedious work, I fixed the skin weighting issues and went from there. I struggled slightly with the interaction animation because of the amount of controls I had to use so I often missed some key-frames that caused a few issues in playback. Nothing major just time consuming setbacks.

Overall, I found this assessment leagues easier compared to the first assessment, despite how much I still struggled with Maya.

[3dbmatt]

WEEK 08 - Biped Skin Weight, Complex Walk Animation and Quadruped

After the struggles of rigging the biped, the rest of the task was somewhat easier, however there were some skin and skin weighting issues that caused a soft restart, such as some of the fingers causing other unrelated body parts to move when the arm was animated. The quadruped was a little more difficult to animate as I could not quite grasp the walk cycle animation. For my complex animation I went with the bad posture which was in the list of 100 Walk Cycles on YouTube. Once the biped was rigged and skinned correctly, animating was a pretty easy breeze that probably would have enjoyed more if I was not already frustrated from the previous issues.

[3dbmatt]

WEEKS 07-08 - Biped Rigging and ikHandling

This section of the assessment was the most tedious and painful part that I have struggled with. It resulted in completely restarting multiple times, a couple of meltdowns and a few rage-quits. A common issue that was encountered was getting the arms to work properly, let alone bend or even move at all. The resolution to these issues are mostly unknown as it was done by a fluke. As to why these problems were encountered, I am unsure, as the tutorial was followed exactly step by step multiple times. It is possible that the issues were caused by the tutorial not showing every setting within Maya that we should and shouldn’t have turned on or active.

[3dbmatt]

WEEKS 05-06 - Biped Skeleton Rig

This particular part of the assignment was quite possibly the hardest part. The initial learning of this process was difficult to follow and I was easily lost. I was fortunate to have the tutorial recordings to fallback on at a later time in order to recover where I fell behind. This particular part however was not the hardest part of the biped. (see next post)

[3dbmatt]

WEEK 04 - Toothbrush Animation

The toothbrush animation, as a beginner, was rather difficult as I did actually struggle to get the hang of the rigging for the actual toothbrush and its controls. However once I had everything figured out, the animation went relatively smoothly from that point on, besides a few positioning and key-frame problems that cause objects to move before they should have.

[3dbmatt]

WEEKS 03-04 - Fox Ball and Tail animation

The fox ball and tail animation was rather intuitive and probably the easiest of the animations for this assessment task. I thought I would steer away from the animation we were being taught in class and went down my own path of humorous creativity. I slightly struggled on getting the tail to look right and flow smoothly with the rest of the animation and key-framing correctly took some time to get used too, but overall one of my favorite animations from this task.

[3dbmatt]

WEEKS 01-02 - Bouncing Ball Animation

This particular animation was easy - but not the most fun out of the rest of them. Learning the use of the Graph Editor was pretty easy to learn when being able to keep up with the tutorial. Overall a simple animation that was easy to do for a beginner.