Disappointed that I hadn’t had a proper chance to animate a character in Maya I decided to attempt that month’s 11 Second Club brief. 11 Second Club is another monthly animation competition in which participants animate an 11 Second sound clip taken from a film (this month it was Ocean's 11), usually using pre-made 3D models available on their website. Wanting to at least attempt 3D character animation, I downloaded a Moom Rig from E-studio as well as 50 or so David O’Reilly’s rigs from his short film The External World which he has made available on his website.
At the time I saw this brief more as an opportunity to fit in some practice around 3D animation in Maya, as it interested me but I did not have the time to learn to model and rig a character on my own. By using these pre-made rigs, this allowed me to focus more on the animation aspect of 3D, particularly the lip-synching and character gestures. Moom is a fairly flexible and accessible rig to animate with meaning I could focus on communicating body language through gesture and facial expression; skills that would not only serve as improving my 3D animation, but also cross over and affect my other forms of animation as well.
For maximum comedic effect and due to the fact that many of O’Reilly’s rigs were impenetrable to a newcomer such as myself, for the secondary character I opted to use what can only politely be described as his ‘breast monster’ character rig. This rig had fully articulable arms as well as breasts and could change the shape of it’s pupils by changing the values in the action window.
I definitely enjoyed animating with Moom. I had never done proper lip-synching up until this point and I found the process of animating facial expressions using Maya’s graph editor rewarding and easy to use. I picked up numerous subtleties of 3D character animation when working on this brief, notably the importance of maintaining eyeline between two subjects in the stage, as well as animating idle poses for when the character’s aren’t talking or are only partially on-screen.
While not perfect, I feel for a first timer the final animation was fairly well put together and effectively communicated character in a verbal as well as a visual manner. A problem arose however when it came to exporting the finished scene. The David O’Reilly rig I had used for the second character, the one I had previously dubbed the ‘breast monster’, did not have compatible shaders with the version of Maya I was using and thus, when it came to render, the model had no shaders; which looked terrible. On top of that, on the renderer which I could use to render the shaders, this affected the Moom rig, who started suffering numerous visual glitches, such as pupil disappearing and screen tearing. Not wanting to submit a subpar animation I quietly dropped the project for the time being on the day of the deadline.
While this was disappointing for me, I still found the experience of working on this brief rewarding in it’s own way, pushing me in future to explore Maya a bit more in depth and one day model, rig and animate my own character. I feel like I picked up a lot in terms of 3D animation principles as well, principles which can be applied to any animation I may do in the future.
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