I have done the animation properly for the forest scene. Rendered it to see what it would look like in the end. I’m still not sure if I should render the scenes as I finish them or wait until the end.

There are some minor weirdnesses in some places, but in general I think it looks pretty good. I’m starting to remember why I had decided to do a machine for my last project. Organic movement is really hard to get right. (and there’s also something weird with youtube messing up the beginning of my videos <.<)

This is probably a little bit more “advanced” than an animatics. I’ve also got some preliminary animation in there because I had a hard time figuring out timing if things just stayed static. I think my closeup cuts probably need some tweaking. . .

And I finally figured out that stupid rotating camera thing. I just had to parent a camera+aim onto an object, which was then put on a motion path.

Never thought it’d be so hard to get a camera turning around my scene while zooming out at the same time. I must be doing something wrong or something. . . Still trying to figure it out.

I should have posted this earlier (I finished this part about two weeks ago) but I didn’t have a good screen recording software. Now I got one. So here be character rigs

Plains Dweller

I did this one first because it was easier. The only somewhat “hard” part was getting the wheels to turn at the right speed (I can’t believe I actually forgot the circumference formula from grade school!) At first I thought I needed to write an expression, and couldn’t get it right, but with a little research I realized I could just use a set driven key.

Forest Dweller

That rig was so annoying to do. I kept getting Maya crashes and made a bunch of mistakes with the skeleton (like forgetting to erase the history before skinning) so I had to redo some parts a few times. But now it’s done. I ventured a little into facial rigging, so I can give him some expressions in the closeups. This tutorial really helped me with the wire deformers (which is what I used, except for the eyes)

First playblast of the forest scene. There are some issues with the animation, but it gives an idea

I’m a bit late with my updates, but. . .yeah.

This is more or less what my shaders will be like for the forest scene

Credits

• Man walking stairs is traced from Eadweard Muybridge
• Stairs blueprints taken from the book “Stair-building and The steel square ” http://openlibrary.org/books/OL7152452M/Stair-building_and_The_steel_square
• Textures are from http://freaky665.deviantart.com and http://joke-art.deviantart.com/
• I also used some footage from the class shares. . . not sure where that stuff was from.

Finally finished both of my character’s models. I think I probably spent too much time on the Plainsdweller. I somehow managed to model the whole head with the normals inside-out and it took me forever to figure out what was wrong ^.^’