Week 12: Animating Styxx

Finally I was able to focus on animating my character! I figured out how to import audio into Maya which helped greatly with timing. I also imported the sketchy animation reference I had previously created, which was a great help with key poses.

Since Styxx would be interacting with the guitar, I made a very basic rig for the guitar and blocked out its movement, then fit Styxx's body around it.

I refined the poses, movement, animated the fingers, and finer details of the character.

I also had time to go back and create a rig for the face, parent it to the main curve and create set driven keys to drive the blend shapes.

During class this week my lecturer helped me reapply dynamic rigs to the locks of hair and adjust the settings to a point where they weren't so sensitive and behaved decently. This saved me a lot of time when animating the hair.

My peer with whom I collaborated with finished modelling & texturing the environmental assets. We had some difficulty figuring out how to convert a 2D image into an HDR format for the sky dome, but in the end the 2D .png texture worked just as well at illuminating the scene (as long as it was tileable). During the week I also set up the lighting, simple camera movement & render settings with ease. I had to increase the samples for the sky dome and directional light to reduce the noise, which increased rendering time, but reduced the noise greatly.

In preparation for my showreel, I set up isolated turntables for the guitar and character; I rendered out a wireframe, ambient occlusion, colour and incandescence version of each which I will overlay and blend in my showreel.

I also set up an After Effects project in prepartion for my final showreel, including titles, turntables, interdisciplinary collaborative work and eventually the animation. At this stage I was feeling more confident I would get things done on time.

See you next week!