Final Project - Culmination

5/1

Worked with Dan Duany

Storyboard:

Our final product was an animation that tied together all of the projects we've done this semester in reverse order. Continuing with that idea, you can see material of the ball slowly change in texture to pay tribute our developing skills in using the Maya software. The ball starts off as a shiny, metallic object, but slowly degrades and by the end, in the solar system scene, it lacks luster, thus representing our lack of Maya literacy in the beginning of the semester.

We have four major scenes in the animation. We first start with dominos, land in the Rube Goldberg machine, bounce into the chest (incorporates both the bouncing ball and treasure chest projects), and finally find ourselves in the solar system. In sum, we redid all of the projects from the semester. If you look closely, you'll see that we have incorporated as many of the 12 principles of animation as possible. Some that we have included are squash & stretch, staging, appeal, anticipation, arcs, etc.

Everything from the scenes are self-modeled and our textures come from https://www.textures.com/library.

A general layout of the animation design is below.

Reflection:

While completing this project, I finally felt like I had grasped the basics of animating with Maya. I didn't lose patience as much, I knew what order to complete things, and I had an understanding of how to accomplish the things I was imagining.

Unfortunately, we struggled to finish the project on time. The major blocker was rendering our scenes. This took a while, especially since we wanted to use Arnold rendering rather then rely on Maya Software or Hardware. Only Dan's computer could render with Arnold, so we lost some efficiency in that respect. Additionally, there were a few times where the rendering came out different than we had expected. This was specifically the case with the FX animations, where we used gravity, constraints, and active bodies. We finally remembered to use cached playback, but we lost time having to render the same scene multiple times. Oh also, DID NOT help that Maya crashed while rendering a few times.

I personally had several issues with my Maya software, specifically with the graph editor, rendering, and FX animations. However, I was able to work through these challenges and in most cases learn from them.

Still images from the animation: