Week 3

I was recommended that I should attach clothing to the rig I'm using. It's not something I have to do but since I'm doing a caber toss, dressing the rig in Scottish attire - like seen in the video I've been using as a reference - is a task I can attempt. I will also learn a tool that I have yet to use in Maya. However, I have decided to add clothing at the later stages of my project so that for now I can focus on the animation. Hopefully adding clothing last won't be an issue, so as a precaution I should probably make sure it is fine. The below link is the tutorial I will be using when the time comes.

Attach clothes to a rig using the Wrap Deformer tool

Since I had done a fair bit of testing with the rig and the beginning part of the animation, I decided that I should begin work on the real animation. I'm fairly confident that I'll be able to produce a decent animation of the rig doing a caber toss.

Lastly, I have decided that I should have the rig walk up to the caber just so the animation doesn't start abruptly. However, I only managed to do half of the walk cycle before lesson had ended so I'll have to finish it in my own time.

Week 2

I have my idea and knew which pre-made rig I was planning to use, so I decided to a bit of a test with the model. I needed to know what the rig was like and how well I could pose it. After moving some of the body parts a little bit I realized that this rig was not that great. You are able to stretch every part of the body which can have it's benefits but I don't like it. Also another flaw is that none of the body parts are constrained. Humans can't rotate their heads 360 degrees but this model can. Unless I am able to add constraints on the joints myself I don't think using this model will be wise.

Since I am only testing right now I decided just to stick with this model and do a bit of animating. Posing the model was fairly easy but the shoulders are a complete annoyance. Getting the shoulders in the correct position to pose the are takes the most time and with my animation being about lifting and throwing, I'm going to be animating the shoulders a lot.

This is my first pose for my model, however, I've adjusted quite a bit since.

The shoulders became an even bigger problem when I went to animate the arms. Because the shoulders are able to move in 360 degrees on all 3 axis it is hard to know how much I rotated them when posing. So when I made the arms extended outwards the in between animation does something abnormal. Instead of the rig just extending it's arms the shoulders roll causing a weird looping action in the arms. The only fix I have found for this so far is shortening the timing between the keyframes, however, this makes the action look like it's happening far too quickly. Timing will be quite crucial during this animation as I need to make the actions of the model look believable.

The above screenshot shows the first frame of the test animation whilst the below screenshot shows the 24th frame. As it can be seen the rig is merely extending it's arm. To note you can see a bizarre twist in the forearm and the shoulder looks odd in the below frame. I have no idea what happened to the forearm but the shoulder is also like that for some strange reason. 

Now the screenshot below this is the 12th frame in the animation. For some reason the arm is actually going backwards inside itself to then extend forward.

Week 1

I was looking at various types of performance to see if there was anything I wanted to create for my 3D project.This led me too looking at various videos of performances of, mimes, circus acts and ballet. However none of these acts inspired me in any way so I decided to have a look at something less conventional.

Mimes

Russian Circus 

Great Chinese State Circus - Swan Lake

I then came across Caber Tossing, and although it isn't much of a performance it has a lot of body movement which will contribute to the character animation. Also this will have quite the emphasis on weight and gravity.

Caber Toss

Making an animation of a character doing a caber toss should be somewhat challenging to recreate the movement but there will be enough video reference for me to learn from. The main challenge I will have is to give the appearance of weight, especially when the character lifts the caber.

I will be using a pre-made rig for my animation I need to decide on which one too use. Since the caber toss requires a lot of physical strength I can't use a rig that wouldn't look right lifting a caber, so I will be using either the Herc or Ugg rig. Currently I'm thinking that using Herc would be the best fitting model.