Character Animation and Performance (500word essay)

UP650043

For my final Animation, I chose to create a scenario that involved my female character and glark interacting on a train. Apprehensive at first, she tentatively approaches Glark and asks to sit in a vacant seat adjacent to him. Glark accepts this and she sits in the seat, with a small smile on her face as she realises he wasnt so scary after all. With regard to the research for the animation of my characters, I produced my own videos that include the movement that I would adopt in my animation. This involved a walk/run cycle, an idle pose and facial movements. This proved to be very useful in my animation as the movements looked more realistic and precise. Also, by producing an internal monologue I was able to address the characters mood/personality and convey this in the animation. In terms of production methodology, I first of all began to build the set that I would use for the animation in Maya. This included a train carriage where the door would open whenever the character entered the room and a few rows of seats. Once this was done, I went online and found a girl rig that I would use as my character. Originally, I was just going to have her animated but then I thought that on a train she could be interacting with another character, hence I chose Glark. Using the reference videos of myself, I then began to animate my scene and created different lighting to set the mood. Once this was done, I then textured the scene and playblasted it. The style of animation I was going for mainly was realistic as I followed the reference videos I did but I did add a cartoonish characteristic to it due to the style of the characters. As well as the movement of the body, for the girl character I animated her face too which helped to convey her personality. Overall, I am pleased with my final animation as I was able to portray the story across and improve my animation skills due to the references. Although, if I were to improve it, I would perhaps have had different people to act out the characters to see which movement was more suited to them. Also, I may have added dialogue so that I could use the techniques I learned from the facial rig exercise, into use.