Progress is being made

Now that I've become more accustomed to using Maya, I've managed to make the first few seconds of my animation. There was a lot of fiddling with the graph editor and it still isn't perfect, but I now feel a lot more confident to continue.

Importance of FK and IK

Since I started learning about 3D animation, I've always been aware that FK and IK handles are very important.

IK handles basically mean that the point will stay where it is and everything will move around it, an example being a foot on the ground; you don't want it to move about as the character tilts forward.

FK handles are good for when you want a point to move around freely, such a waving arm.

My problem was that without thinking about it, I decided to suddenly switch from FK to IK handles on the character's hand when he rested it on a door. This resulted in horrible in-between frames when I flattened the tangents in the graph editor.

I'm currently looking into smoothing out the animation with built-in Maya tools, but I will most likely have to re-do all of the hand animations I've done thus far.

Slow progress in the following month

For the following month (until the end of March)  progress on my dissertation piece will be slow, and this is mainly due to my focus being shifted to the project that I'm completing for the Ipswich Museum. It may turn out that we finish the project sooner than expected and I can focus on my dissertation, but I'm making this post as a worst-case scenario.

Note that although progress on the dissertation will be slow, it will not be halted. I am still trying to dedicate a few days a week to it, but I'm coming into constant problems that are slowing me down further which I will elaborate on in future posts.

Encountered a problem in Maya

Yesterday afternoon I spent an hour doing careful animation to my character, trying to get the subtle movements perfect as he pushes a door open and leans around. Everything was going perfectly well when suddenly, this happened:

The previous hour of work had been completely overrun by shapes like this, and there was no recovering them.

After looking online, I found that the problem was that I was editing the joints of the rig as well as the curves by mistake, something which makes this particular rig break completely. After this happened, I decided to keep two basic rules in mind whilst I animate:

• Only show the curves and polygons in the view finder
• Always save the file as I go along

Setting up the scene

In order to set up my scene, ready for part 1 of my animation, I had to watch a couple of tutorial videos. First of all, I had to learn about modelling in Autodesk Maya, as I hadn't considered it as being a challenge when I initially started the project. It turns out that modelling in Maya is actually quite different to modelling in 3DS Max, as the tools and menus are entirely different for it. However, after learning where all of the tools are located, I found it fairly easy to set up a small room with a door.

I also had to learn some finer details about using the Eleven rig, which is where this YouTube video came in very handy. If I hadn't taken the time to watch it, I would have been animating a lot slower throughout my the project.