Posted on October 26, 2014

Problem: Using Lighting, Rendering, Texturing and Shading create a 10-20 second animation for the Unicycle provided.

Solution: For this project, I decided to have unicycle warm up in the beginning, do a stunt and then celebrate at the end of the movie.

I started by creating translation, rotation and scale groups for the unicycle like the ones we setup for the ball bounce. Since the animation was going to have different parts like jumping, warming up and celebrating I decide to animate them in parts. For the environment, I simply used a plane and extruded it to create a ramp and a stage. I also created a spring platform just before the stage as a separate object.

First, I started with the warm up sequence and set the translate, rotate and scale attributes till frame 170 and tried playing it. Soon I realized that using deformers for twist and squash were better for what I wanted to do and thus reset everything for the scale group and used deformers instead.

Second, I repeated the above steps for the jumping and landing sequence. This was a bit tricky as I had to make sure that the unicycle didn’t go even I bit under the platform or ground at any time.

Third, I set the attributes for landing on the final stage and celebrating.
Last, used different types of shaders and materials to apply to different surfaces and setup a bunch of different cameras and spot lights. Then rendered different parts of the scenes separately and created a single clip.

The animation principles I used are squash and stretch, anticipation, staging and follow through.

The maya binary file is here.