The Jungle Adventures, (Movie) - On - going
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This fun project is to make an Animated movie in Maya. This is a team project, and the team consists of artists as well as computer science students.
Here is the pipeline and the stages of its making.
Step 1: Story Boarding:
In this step, we work out the story for our movie. Basically, our movie comprises in a Jungle Setting, and the setup is similar to Indiana Jones. You have the main character, who tries to save the damsel in distress along with his partner the monkey. I dont want to give away the story here, but basically its an adventure movie with traps, emotions, and of course, a few laughs :)
Step 2: Inital Sketches:
To bring out the character, we tried various sketches, and finally decided on the ones shown below for each of the characters.
Step 3: Modeling the Characters, Props, Scenes
We break into Maya and start modelling the characters. We need to have enough geometry so that the characters look cool, and also we need to ensure that the flow of geometry makes it animatable. Here are some pictures of the characters in 3D.
Step 4: Making the Rig
This is the most important step. A rig is basically the setup of the the underlying bones and joints. The power of the underlying rig makes life easy while animating. Hence, this step needs to be done carefully. Since all our characters are biped, we could use a base rig and move on from there. Here are some pictures of the rig.
Above : Rig in the Hypergraph View
Below : Rig in the perspective display
In addition, to make the rig more powerful, we can add in a few controls to the rig using mel script. Features such as automatic breathing, eye jittering, automatic tail movement for the monkey adds realism to the movement of the characters without the artists having to break sweat over it.
Finally, to make the rig have a simple interface, a GUI was written with sliders to enable simple usage and quick animation. Quality time spent here can ensure time saved while animating. |
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Step 5: Making a Rough Animated Movie
In this step, we make a rough animated movie, to get the timing right of the animation. This allows us to visualise how the movie will look like, what camera angles it uses and it allows us to hone the animation stage towards those settings. Hold your breath, this one is gonna come out soon.
On-Going Steps
Step 6: Shading
Step 7: Skinning
Step 8: Animating
Step 9: Rendering
Step 10: Post - Processing
Contact
Venkat Krishnaraj
venkat.krishnaraj@gmail.com
Masters,
Computer Science
Cornell University
