Walk Cycle with Moom!

I got the chance to have a little play on Maya at actually animating with it! This was a really good opportunity for me to make things move with a program that I am completely brand new to and I found it not too difficult once I got my head round the key frames.

Below is a little preview of Moom and how you can move each part of him to a different position. What I really liked about this task was that you can move the body parts to the extreme and I think this is something that you can do without the character looking too out of proportion. I enjoyed making him move, however I actually animated Moom moving forward which I think he was only meant to walk in the spot. This actually was quite difficult as when you moved him forward his spine went a little out each time and was hard to keep repositioning. I still think my walk cycle went okay considering I had never used Maya before and I look forward to learning more about it!



Below is my play blast of Moom's walk cycle!

Production Diary - IDENTS - 4/05/2016

I have actually finished both my ident animations today and I am quite happy with both of them. Today I worked on my National Geographic animation just to clean it up and include the font that I wanted to appear, I tried many ways of making the text all turn around at once but it was a little too complicated so I decided it would be a better option to just go with my original idea of having the text all slide out of the national geographic logo. 

Below you can see how I did make it a little nicer by adding a mask on each text layer so that the text would only appear outside the mask layer. This way it looked a little better than just sliding out with opacity going form 0 to 100%.

 

I actually much prefer my E4 ident when looking at both of them together, just because I prefer the look of the animation and I don't really like the fish I animated in the National Geographic ident. I am very pleased that I have completed both of my animations before the deadline as this way it allows me to have a little play on my Maya walk cycle and have time to write my evaluation!

Making my Own Object on Maya!

I had to make my own object in Maya and after playing with Moom quite a lot, I actually found this task quite easy and I'm starting to feel a little more confident in comparison to how I felt about Maya at the beginning. I decided to keep my object simple just because I have a lot to do in my ident projects so I just wanted to keep it simple, so I chose to make a pen. I feel like I could create now more complex objects after making this pen.

Here is the pen in real life.



Here is my Maya model! I also put in some texture to my object and I feel like this really brought it to life, and I only knew how to do this because of the tutorials on estudio! I did find however, that because my object was black it was quite hard to light on a black background.



If I were to make this pen model better I would have figured out how to add the little ridges on the lid and this would have made my model a little more detailed. I wasn't sure how to do this so maybe this is something I can look into.