COSC 3P98 Animation Project
By Kyoko Umeda
Tomoko Hirai
Some scenes from "First Date".
Introduction
The basic idea of our animation is to create realistic scenes that could not happen in our real world. Also we wanted our animation to be a romantic fairy tale. With this basic idea, we came up with the idea of creating date scenes of a couple in space. We chose Saturn as the main stage so that Saturn's ring could represent a river and the couple could enjoy boating on Saturn's ring.
Soon after starting to animate our models, we realized that this animation was not going to be easy because of the complexities of the structures. We even thought that we would not be able to see its completion. How ever it was too late to turn back.
We spent most of our time on animating the boy's rowing movement. It looks simple at a glance, but it was not simple at all, because we did not how to move models properly. We had to move oars along with the boy's hands, and the boy himself had to move along with the boat. Unfortunately, we failed in showing the perfection of the rowing motion with our poor camera movement skills.
The following is the detailed description of our animation including our original models, textures, etc.
Models
1. Girl:
We started our project with building this model and soon recognized how difficult it would be to achieve our goals working human models. We did not expect how complex animating a model constructed with bones and skins would be.
We begun constructing her leg and moved towards her head. First, we created her leg bone and bound it to a half cut re formed sphere as her shoe and a cylinder as her leg. Her body was composed of a cone as a skirt and a sphere as a top. Her arms were also formed with cylinders as her legs had been. She does not have hands, unfortunately. We decided not to create her hands considering their complexity and little importance in our scenes. She has beautiful big blue eyes and long eye rush. She can blink even though her blinking is hardly seen in the scenes. I mostly modeled her body, but her small parts, such as nose, lips, eye brows, and eye lashes were modeled by my partner. Thanks to her, the girl has such sexy looking lips.
2. Boy:
Modeling him was quite easy after doing the girl. The basic structure of this model is the same as her girlfriend's. What we had to do was to make some minor changes to the girl so that this figure would look like a boy.
3. Space:
We used a huge simple sphere (NURBS Primitives). This is the easiest object to create. What we had to do was just make it bigger enough to wrap it over other objects. After we applyed the texture to it, we had what looked like a perfect space. Other objects were located in the space sphere and moved inside this space object.
4. Saturn:
A sphere and a torus were used to construct Saturn and its ring. This object can be easily recognized as Saturn because of its ring. Therefore, we chose it as the main stage in the space. The torus was scaled to be flat and moved by points to make the hole big to fit the sphere into it. The ring is representing a river, so we used water texture colored blue with a blinn material.
5. Boat:
A sphere was used for the boat and two cubes were used for two seats. We used scale and move tool to fit the seats in the boat. The idea of the shape of the boat came from the shape of a crescent moon. We believe that this boat made the scene of our animation more romantic. We applied lambert material to the boat.
6. Oars:
Oars consist of two objects, a cylinder and a cone. Mostly, we used the scale tool to make the cylinder longer and the cone flatter. We applied pinkish wood texture, which was already in the Maya texture library, to the oars.
7. Heart:
To complete the "kiss" scene and express "love", we thought that the heart-shaped object was perfect appearing in the last few seconds of the love scene. To create a heart, sphere was scaled and moved by points. To create a heart, transparent phong material was colored pink to express couple's feelings.
8. Text:
We created the text because we thought that it was appropriate to include our names at the end of the animation. First, we put the text inside the heart, but it looked as if we were in love and kissing, so we changed the movement of the text. Newly changed scene looked like "The Story of Tomoko and Kyoko". Therefore, we changed it again. A bigger problem came after we rendered the frames. In the rendered picture, lower case "y" did not appear. Only few people will notice that the character "y" is not the lower case. We had to use upper case character "Y" because of the error. We could not find our what we did wrong, so we had to use upper case character "Y", instead.
Animation
Models:
Animating the boat along with Saturn's ring was quite easy. We set a path along the ring and attached the boat to it. At certain points, we fixed the angle of the boat so that the boy's back always faced the direction in which they were going.
As we mentioned in the introduction, the most difficult part was animating the rowing motion. We tried several ways to make the oars move along with the boy's hands. Fist, we tried animating his hands and oars separately. The result was awful and disappointing: the oars kept jumping up high in the air. To correct this, we created bones for the oars and connected them to boy's hands. This method failed completely. Next, we removed bones from the oars and parented them under the boy's hand. Strangely, we succeeded with the right hand oar, but the left oars still jumped up too high. Finally, we decided to leave the right hand oar as it was, and make many key frames for the left oar's movement.
The kiss scene, which appears last, is the most important scene in our animation. It had to be beautiful and romantic. However, the couple looked as if they were kissing through the camera, although they were not really. When we made them kiss, the girl's nose would stick into her boyfriend's cheek. From the top view, it shows clearly that the boy is located slightly left from his girlfriend.
It is sad that we were not be able to show both the girl's and the boy's movements enough to be recognized how well built they were becouse of the limited length of time. (Technically, they can do everything, even dance.)
Camera:
Three cameras were used. Camera1 was set far from the Saturn at first, and gradually came closer to the boat. To show the rowing scene longer, we put camera3 to take the scene. Then camera2 was set to start with the shot of the boat from under the "river" of the Saturn. After approaching the girl's and the boy's faces with camera2, we switched to camera1.
Lighting:
We used an ambient light and a spot light. The
Textures
We could get a big help from our friend to make these beautiful textures. They are made with a PhotoShop application, and are jpeg formats.
1. Space
This is repeated 10 by 10 to make the beautiful space. Therefore you can find the Pleiades 100 times in one space.
2. Saturn
The texture is rotated 90 degrees and repeated twice to show finer layers of colour.
3. Skirt (girl)
This texture is designed by my partner.
4. Shirts (boy)
To make the boy a fresh looking appearance, we chose a light blue and white striped pattern for his shirt.
Conclusion
Though we have had a good time doing this project and learned a great deal about creating animation with Maya, we feel exhausted at this moment. The amount of time that we spent on this project was beyond our expectations: Most of the time during this work, we were frustrated with the small progress we could make each day. We felt the project was moving ahead only at a snail's pace. Although I do not know how my partner feels about computer graphics, I personally think that, in future, I want to be a viewer, not a creator.
Finally, I hope you will enjoy our animation, it represents our best efforts.