Maya Evaluation

3D animation. I may have finally come round. I started this brief having no interest in creating animation in 3D, and a fairly strong dislike of watching 3D animation in general. Initially I completely hated Maya, it just seemed like a total nightmare, a thousand hidden menus, loads of concepts I hadn't come across before, and a pretty steep learning curve. I really thought I would never make it anywhere with this project. After struggling to come up with an idea for the animation, I finally just knocked out an idea in a couple of minutes, and amazingly it ended up working out pretty well for me. My character, a snowman, turned out to be really easy to manipulate and animate. I initially chose a snowman as I had no confidence in my modeling skills, and it would be easy to assemble from a few spheres and cylinders. Once it was parented together and had deformers in, the range of motion I could get from it was surprising. My first idea was the snowman meeting a hot waterbottle, falling asleep with it and waking up as just a pair of eyes and a top hat in a melted pool of water. The idea I actually ran with involved the snowman starting without a nose, then discovering a carrot and sticking it on his face as a nose. Following a thoughtful pause, he was going to remove it from his face and place it in a phallic position, and end with a sly wink and a Fonze-esque 'eeyyyy!'. Timewise, with the 30 second maximum length, I found I couldn't achieve this without it all feeling too rushed, so I cut it at just placing the carrot on the face and smiling. The snowman has quite an emotional rollercoaster in his 26 seconds of existence, beginning looking forlornly around, before being startled by the sight of an unfamiliar object on the ground. After bounding over to it and picking it up, he scrutinizes it before before reeling back in surprise at the realisation of what he has in his hand. Finally he cracks a happy little smile at being complete with his new nose.

The graph editor was one of the hardest parts to get to grips with. Making the snowman look like he had weight when he impacted on the bounce was quite tricky. There are some parts where the movement could definately do with smoothing out more, particularly after he's picked the carrot up and is waving it around in front of his face.

Lighting wise I tried seting up 3 point lighting, but it didn't really look that great, it wasn't producing enough shadow. In the end I settled on using a single spotlight, which created a nice sun rising, early morning sort of look.

Rendering ended up presenting a few unexpected problems. I foolishly decided to render out in 720HD as it looked so good, but it took an absolute eternity. After spending an age rendering out a section, I found the texture on the tree trunks was moving around as the snowman did. They'd somehow been parented to the snowman at some point, so after correcting that I had to render it out again. As it was all taking so long, I left a long section rendering overnight. Coming in the next day I'd made the schoolboy error of rendering through the wrong camera, so all you could see was trees. So I sacked off the HD nonsense, and quickly rendered it out in 640x480.

I had wanted to add sound to the animation, but I didn't want to use audio from the internet. I was planning on recording the effects for it, but ran out of time in the end, so I decided to leave it silent instead of just cobbling any old bits of audio onto it.

To sum up, suprisingly, this has actually been the project I've been most pleased with. I've pretty much hated everything I've produced so far, but I'm almost kinda happy with this one simply because at the start of the project I felt like I'd never get anywhere with it. There's a lot of refinement that could be done to improve it, but it stands up as a fairly complete piece as it is. So, the good thing is I think I'll continue using Maya, and considering I'd have sworn blind I'd never touch it again at the start, that's a pretty big deal. Im less interested in using it for character animation, but creating assets to composite into video or flatten into flash is pretty appealing, I can see a lot of potential there.

Maya brief. Done.