Maya 5.5 - Animation Submission

The animation is finished and ready to be submitted, I probably could have spend more time on it but I am happy with it as it is now and don't want to over do it. Below is the animation iteself, my Technical Brief Summary and Reflective Evaluation.

Behind Tears of a Clown

Technical Brief Summary

The hardest and in my opinion also the most crucial part of the animation project was to correctly rig the character because it is important to be able to effective control the body to convey character’s body language. The legs and feet play major part in the animation so I have crated “reverse-foot” rig by using joint, IK and FK handles to be able to move the feet naturally and have great control over them. 

The feet move on and off the unicycle paddles so I have used Colour Blend node between the group that controls the feet controller and locator constrained to the paddle. That was I was able to control when the feet move freely in the set, while the character walks for example and when they follow the paddles so it looks like the character is paddling, I believe it was more effective than to key frame the feet and paddle individually throughout the animation.  

  

Another important part was to currently parent and group the individual elements, such as the body mesh, unicycle, IK handles, controllers and so on. I have used main controller to move around the character with all the controls but I have used a group to group all elements that were required to move together. 

 

Reflective Evaluation

After I have decided on the character trait and action I have conducted research on the emotion and its body language, as well as researching ideas for character design. After looking at several images I drew few design ideas for the character, a sad clown. The face was one of the most important parts for me because I have decided to use a texture for the face, for I wanted to use the body to convey the emotion instead relying on the face animation. In the end I thought run-down and messy clown make up with sad expression would work the best.

In the final animation the face is texture is small and not greatly detailed because I just wanted it to show the expression but not stand out too much. For the same reason the character has mainly only basic pale colours. If I had more time to work on the texture I would take the time to stich the UVs together in a better way so it would have been easier for me to paint it.

When deciding colours for the character and the set I have somewhat kept the Colour Theory in mind and picked pale greens and blues mainly, in attempt to make the set appear cold yet not too depressing. Few parts are in red so there is some contrast in the colours.  

The main problems I had while animating were the hands. I have used IK handles that I believed would make it easier for me but it was really hard to animate smooth curves when the arms moved, I believe FK handles would have been more efficient and helpful to animate the arm more easily, it helped me to learn just how important the rigging process is and to plan it more ahead.