Cristina's Blog

Maya Bouncing Ball Animation After having created a 2D Bouncing ball animation in Adobe Animate, it naturally follows that we should look at 3d Animation. Thus, our exercise was to create a bouncing ball in Maya. Some initial research was done to investigate animation in Maya and one important concept surfaced – that of rigging which enables animations to come alive and not just move in 3d but move as a series of connected items to enable a complex feature such as a character come to life and move arms and legs in addition to moving simply in a direction. As a starting point we were given a 3D sphere primitive with a “Rig” already attached which enabled movement in 3 directions and also squashing and stretching. This did make life much easier and I was able to quickly set up a few key frames with movement, squash and stretch which enabled Maya to fill in intermediate keyframes. In addition, a Skydome light with a background was added to provide a natural looking backgrou...

Coco, the monkey portrays a typical young cartoon character, which although cartoonlike has many realistic features such as muscle tone and fur which is more realistic than normal cartoon portrayals. This tends to give the character more believability coupled with his happy, energetic, enthusiastic and adventurous manner, most people would empathise with him. His attire is very product oriented, having the “C” for Coco pops on his baseball cap and “Coco” written on his shirt. In addition, the choice of the monkey has allowed the advertising executives to use his colour and his texture of his fur to emphasise his affinity with the product (his fur having a very similar texture to the product and being much the same colour). The enthusiasm he has for the product seems to even spill over to his enemies, the crocodile and hyenas and thus it should be easy for any human to be won over by Coco winning over his enemies using the product. There is also a catchy tune asso...

  Rotoscoping As an exercise, we were asked to produce a rotoscope animation around the theme “energetic”. This required that we shoot a video of some energetic action, edit the captured footage and then using Pohotoshop, draw over each video frame in a selected section. My normal activities consist of mostly studying and computer related activities therefore I chose cycling as an energetic action suitable for rotoscoping. This task shows how incredibly time consuming it is to provide rotoscoping for animations depending upon the frame rate and complexity of the character. Upon hiding the video layer and reviewing the animation, it became apparent that although the rotoscoping and animation was good, it was not entirely suitable for looping due to the fact that subject constantly moves in relation to the camera and upon reflection, it would have been better to have the videographer maintain position with respect to the subject. It would also have been better to ...