Final Project
Our final project for CPSC 807 was to create a 15-30 second animation that showed off techniques taught in the class. My animation is a quick sequence of a guy building a snowman. An interesting challenge I had on this project was the snow particle effect. I had trouble getting the right color for the snow flacks, so I rendered them separately and composited them in after in AfterEffects.
Motion Capture Clean Up
The goal of this project was to gain experience with cleaning up motion captured animation and using dynamics in Maya. In my scene an army man kicks in a door and looks around the house. To clean up the motion capture data I simplified the curves. I started going through the remaining keys tweaking the animation, but after a couple of hours of not making much progress I decided to attempt another approach. I resampled the animation curves so there was a keyframe on every tenth frame. This removed all the excess data from the motion capture and left me with a good approximation of the original movement. Then I went through and adjusted every keyframe to improve the performance. I thought texturing the character would be a challenge, but when I looked at the model, I realized it had already been UV mapped, the UVs were just all on top of each other. I used the Select UV Shell tool in the UV Editor to separate and realign everything. Then I used Photoshop to create texture maps to apply to the model. I rendered using MetalRay so i could get the shadows. I used an expression to control the intensity of the light coming from the “TV” and another to animate the police lights.
