COSC 3p98 Animation Project Documentation

Chika Ishida


 

Atomic Bomb

Girls and bears in bee like space costumes are flying around the centre stone. First they are flying slowly morphing into one another when they meet in the air. Then they speed up moving getting faster and faster. As they fly faster they end up crashing into each other and explode.

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My intention for this animation
I wanted to make this animation totally unrealistic because I think even this 3D graphic animation tool Maya is able to model objects realistic, still those objects are not real. From this reason I made up all characters in my animation and everything does not exist in real life. However I made this whole idea of animation from electrons moving around atom. I was thinking if an electron is not just an negitive charge as explained in chemistry class but some sort of creature with wings. They are not just moving around an atom but they are flying around the atom with their wing. This is where my basic idea for this animation project came from. I also wanted to make a 2D character to 3D, which I made for my web project in visa 2f95. This is where the girl is from. (see this)
Characters modelling
This is the part I enjoyed the most in this project. Maya offers several ways to do modeling. I could not cover everything there but I challenged some of them. I started from NURB sphere for most of my model. First, it was hard to control the modeling tools but once I got hang of them, modeling became so much fun for me.
Girl's head: This was the most complicated part and the first modeling I did in the animation. I used eight NURB spheres (face, hair, eyes, eyelids, and lips) to make the head. I increased the number of control point of NURB and created detail of the face structure by manipulating those control points one by one. The lips are another object created by two NURB spheres same as making the face detail. I made the eye texture with Adobe Illustrator and which was imported through file texture. The eyes have a blink attribute, which simply makes the eyes blink. The Blink attribute is done by changing the angle of sweeping sphere shape. I learned this in Maya tutorial. The hair is done like putting a wig instead of making a texture of the face and hair.
Cowboy hat: I was not planning to make this hat at first. It was hard to make a nice front side of the girl's wig, so I decided to make a hat to hide her forehead. This Cowboy hat is made by a cone (top part of the hat), a cylinder (ribbon) and tube (visor) shapes. I made the texture of cow skin by changing the cloud texture in Maya. In the end, the hat looks so cool on the girl.

Space costume: The space helmet is a sphere squashed down a little bit with baby blue transparency colour. I made foots, legs and arms from changing the shape of NURB sphere. I made the bee body again by changing the shape of NURB sphere, but this time I had to increase the number of control points to make the body a more smooth and organic shape. I made the texture of the bee body with Adobe PhotoShop. I duplicated this and made a space costume for the bear. I changed the legs, arms and foots to distinguish the body from the girl's body.

Wing: I made the wings of the bee from simple plane by moving control points. After I made one wing, I used "duplicate" and "scale" to make the other three wings. A wing has a "fly" attribute, which moves a wing to look like it's flying. To do this, I moved all four wings' pivots to centre of all four and rotate them. I also made the material transparent to make the wings look more like an insects's wing.

Bear head: The head is composed with a nose, a white part face, a pink part head,  ears,  and eyes. I used NURB sphere to make everything.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Atom: I created a large number of control points to use curving tool. This tool has effect like I punched clay. By using this tool I could make this complicated shape. I modified the marble texture in Maya to make texture for this object. I made the material transparent so other characters behind this can be seen.

Particles and emitter: I set a particle emitter in my scene to make explosions. I chose cloud as a particle and I set the colour of white. First, the shadow colour of clouds was set black as default. My scene does not have much light, so it looked like black smoke. Then I changed the shadow colour of the cloud to light blue so it would suit my background colour better.

Background: Since I move my camera 360-degree, I had to have background everywhere. I solved this by making a huge sphere. Everything happens in this giant sphere, so the camera catches the background from any angle. I did not want to make a specific scene as a background. I just wanted to make "nowhere", so I put the texture that I made by changing the colour and properties of the clouds.
 
 

Animate Characters
Since I made the attribute of "fly" and "blink", I just had to make the bears and girls fly around the atom. This is what I thought first but it was not that easy. Maya has a couple of different ways to animate and I chose animating by setting key frames.
Girls & Bears: The atom is the centre of all movement, so I moved pivots of all characters to the centre of the atom. Then I could just rotate them random x, y, and z direction. I changed the speed of the characters by increasing the degree of rotation between each key frames. Characters have to be synchronised at the moment one is absorbs into another, so after I animated the first character, I animated the other characters backward from the frame that the character is absorbed or crashed.

Emitter & particles: The emitter starts emitting particles at the moment that last girl and bear crash and stops after 200 frames. Because I set the emitter to emit particles for that moment, it looks like an explosion. I added gravity to the particles at the frame the emitter stops emitting. Consequently all the particles are wiped out from the scene and texts show up at where the particles were.

Spot light: Spot light appear at the frame that the last girl and bear crash and lit up at that moment. Then text shows up after the particles are dragged down by gravity and this spot light moves along the text.
 


Camera

After I finished modeling and animating, to make my animation good or not depended on how I set the camera. I chose the setting key frame to animate the camera again because I can check what camera is viewing the sense better. What I wanted to put in my animation at this point was
I was able to include everything I wanted to put in my movie.

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