Posted on December 7, 2014

Problem: Make an awesome animation lasting 10-30 seconds.

Solution: For my final project, I decided to play around with dynamics and use all other techniques learnt throughout the semester. The video mainly showcases dynamics, key-frame animation and 2D texturing.

I started off with animating Ken. At first I used Human IK in Maya to build the rig and animate Ken. But the results were nowhere close to what I wanted the animation to look like. I tried various different techniques like weight painting, muscle tool, etc. to get the poses right but nothing seemed to work just right.
Thus, I ended up using FIK and it took me a lot less time to setup the poses right. Once I had all the poses key framed, I used images to build a departmental store like surrounding. Since, I had already wasted a lot time on Human IK I didn’t have enough time to model objects for the environment.

For the dynamics part, I modeled a simple can with as low polygon count as possible and used duplicate special to stack 150 to make a tower. This part of the animation was in a separate file to make rendering faster.

A similar environment was setup for the cans and a soccer ball was used to strike them down. AS simple it may sound but having everything setup just right is a very cumbersome and time consuming task. The cans I modeled just wouldn’t stack together and would fall apart.

So, I had to use simple unsmoothed cylinders to create the final animation and even then it was very hard to align them all perfectly. Since it takes a while to render the frames, I rendered 30 test frames well over 15-20 times last night to test out the settings.

I rendered frames for 7 different animation clips from both the scenes and put them together for the final video.

The maya files are here:

Character Animation
Soda Can Animation
Images/Textures

Original Soda Can
Original Soda Can Tower

Final Video

Project Idea

A youtube video to deomstrate.

Storyboard