BY

© MICHAEL MONTEAN & RYAN KUO

Olympic Diver

STORY
 
 
 
 

It starts out with a spot light moving around the olympic rings in a room that has no lights.  A flaming arrow then is seen racing towards the camera heading towards the big torch.  The torch is lit and lightens the room.  The room is actually an olympic pool with high diving boards.  At the top is the olympic diver.  The camera starts at the base of the tower and moves up to the top, where the diver is located.  Once the camera reaches the top, the diver bows for the camera and is ready to take the plunge.  He walks towards the end of the board takes a jump and springs into the air.  He gets into the tuck position, and at this point he gets frozen in that position while a camera circles around him.  Then he plunges downwards doing 3 1/2 flips before he dives into the pool.  He comes to the surface and waves to the camera.  The camera then goes back to the flaming torch from the beginning, and the fire dies down to nothing to end the animation.
 

PRODUCTION PROCESS
 
 
 

MODELING:

diver: (created by Michael Montean)

The diver was created using 4 cylinders, 4 spheres and two half spheres.  The 4 cylinders were used for the arms and the legs.  2 half spheres were used for the feet, and the 4 spheres were used to create the body the head and the 2 hands.  This was the most tedious part of the modeling process in creating the diver.  Many extra isoparms had to be inserted into the spheres to be able to create the chest and the stomach muscles on the diver.  After 3 days of working, finally he was completed.  Bones were used inside to make the diver walk, jump and flip.  The arms had to have special flexors on them to create the biceps.  As the diver walks, the arms move and the muscles bulge.  It is hard to see since the camera is back a ways from the diver in this scene.  The arms and the legs were taken from the tutorial primitive man in the Maya 2 book.  2 scripts were made to make sure when the diver walked that the feet would bend properly at the ball of the foot.  The tutorial had the scripts but I had to alter them because the diver was facing the opposite direction that the primitive man was facing.  In the spine of the diver, the IK spline handle was used so that there was a smooth curve when the diver had to get into the tuck position.  Regular IK handle's were used for the arms and the legs.  The head of the diver was formed somewhat like the body.  I needed to use extra isoparms to create a nose and neck.   I found out later that I should have made indents for the eye sockets because when the camera circles around the diver in the tuck position, you can see how much the eyes bulge out of his head.  To make the eyes, a V ramp was used with black, blue and white colours applied.  To get the hair I made a texture in VizPaint2D3.3
 
 

This was a bit tedious at times.  Had to make sure the hair would fit in the right spots on the side of his head.  Had the most problems with trying to orient the mouth in the right spot.
 

the scene: (created by Ryan Kuo)

The diving platform is created using basic 3D primitives such as cylinders, cubes, and planes.  Those primitives are scaled to form various parts of the platform.  I used marble texture on the platform.  The water is made of a 2D plane and the texture is water texture.  The pool bottom is made of 3 2D planes and the planes are grouped together.  The 3 textures were obtained from www.olympic.org and applied to the three corresponding planes.  The torch is made by a curve and was revolved around the y-axis.  The arrow was basically a cylinder and a cone.   The olympic rings consist of 5 torus's.   The names were just made with the text tool in Maya.
 

ANIMATION
 
 
 

INTRODUCTION:

The introduction consists of a spot light moving about using a locator which is behind the rings on a fixed path.

LIGHTING OF THE TORCH:

When trying to attach the fire to the head of the arrow, it would flame up on the cylinder instead of our desired effect.  So to get over this complication, a transparent sphere was placed in front of the arrow at a specific location and flames were attached to the sphere.  This created the look we had intended.
To light up the arrow, the fire intensity, scale, life span, and fire turbulence had to be key framed from no fire to a lit arrow.  Because the fire does not provide any light to the scene a spot light had to be aimed at the arrow head and animated with the arrow.  A camera had to be located approximately half way between the torch and the arrows path.  The camera's focal length was animated so that the arrow would fit into the picture.  The same idea to light the torch was used.  A spot light was animated in the upward direction to simulate the fire intensity as it grows and to provide light for the olympic rings.

POOL:

This scene is a transition scene from the opening scene to the diver on the board.  Camera was moved to show the bottom of the pool.  We animated the transparency of the water in order to see the bottom of the pool.

DIVER BOW:

The diver bow is both a camera animated as well as the diver.  The camera starts at the base of the tower and moves upwards to the top, then zooming in to the diver.  The divers IK spline handle was key framed and moved ahead in order for him to bend over.  To move the arm, the shoulder joints and the elbow joints had to be rotated about their axis and key framed.  We tried using the IK handles created on the arms, but couldn't rotate the elbow joint when using this method.  A spot light is turned on the diver when he begins to bow.

WALKING ON THE DIVING BOARD:

This part of the animation became a frustration at times.  To get the effect of walking the pelvis joint was selected and moved to the end of the diving board, leaving the feet handles at the start.  Then, to key frame the leg movement in a sliding fashion, the animation was started at the 1st frame and slowly frame by frame the body would move forward.  When a desired frame was reached, we put one leg in front of the body, keyed it and left the other in it's position keying it as well.  This was continued until the diver was almost at the end of the board.  We had to set a frame for the pelvis joint once again in this position, and then moved it upwards to a desired height, and at approximately half way from the start of the jump to the finish it was keyed.  Then, to make the feet lift off the ground for each step this same process had to be established once again.  Putting the scene back to frame one, we moved frame by frame until the leg was about center of its movement, lifting the leg and setting it's position.  Once again to make the arms move, we had to start at frame one repeating the same process.  As the left leg would move forward, we would move the right arm forward and the left arm back and vice versa for the right leg.  At the start of the jump, the divers pelvis had to be lowered in order to get a bending at the knees moving the entire diver downwards.  Then lifting off for the jump, the diver bends up one knee, and goes off with his toes on the other leg.  Both arms are thrust backwards using the IK handles on the arms.  This as well uses a flexor on the biceps which is animated at the same time, bulging the muscles in his biceps when the arm is raised.

FLIPPING AND DIVE:

This part we found difficult, especially when trying to render the final scenes.  Every time we would go to render we would find out the divers arms were rotated the wrong way and out of control.  Finally after 5 try's we figured out that the IK handles hadn't been grouped together with the diver and the rest of his structure creating the random location of the arms.  During the process of animation we were trying to figure out how to actually rotate the entire diver after making his tuck.  We would like to thank Tony Abou-Assalah for his idea of grouping the entire diver and his bones together in order to get the flipping action we desired.  This took a couple days to finally put together and we were beginning to think we might have to make the diver do a cannon ball instead.
The frames were then set for the divers elbows, shoulders, IK handles, and IK spline handle at the last flip.  We set the appropriate frame putting him in the dive position using the handles and rotations for elbows and shoulders.

ENDING:

The diver waves to the camera using a key frame on the elbow joint and rotating it on the z-axis.  Camera is animated to the torch once again and key frames are set on the lights as well as the fire.  The fire goes out with the lights making the scene dark once again.  In the final credits, the rings were made transparent and we animated the transparency to bring the rings into view.  The cone angle of the spot light was animated as well to create a circular fade in and fade out.

TOOLS USED
 
 

Maya 2.0 - animation's and modeling
MovieMaker - pieced scenes together and made them into a movie file
MediaConvert - change rendered frames into quicktime
SoundEditor - changing format of wave file
VizPaint2D3.3 - used for painted texture
MediaPlayer - for viewing the animation
 

CONCLUSION
 
 

We found that Maya 2.0 was a very powerful tool, not only in modeling, but also in animating.  We found it interesting that a bone structure could be incorporated into a model in order to give it a realistic appearance when moving the model.  Our first thoughts for the movie was to make it very simple because of the time factor, but as we got into it more and more, we ended up making a more complex final product.  Our initial plan was to have a diver at the top and just to make him do flips and dive into the pool.  But as time went on, we continued to get more and more idea's, finally ending in this final product.   It has satisfied us greatly to see the results.  Even though there were many frustrations in piecing it all together, we still think that doing an animation instead of an essay is the way to go.