Obstacle course: Post mortem

After much motivational issues, I finally completed my Obstacle Course for University.

I tackled each obstacle one at a time and in a linear fashion. In the beginning I found it quite difficult to create realistic movements as I have only animated once before this and it was quite some time ago. However with every obstacle I found it became easier and easier to animate and I became quicker at it too. For one who really dislikes character animation, I found that I actually enjoyed myself creating this.

After each obstacle, I rendered out a play blast so that I could see how the character moved fluidly, and from there I adjusted the timing and movements accordingly.

Below is a untextured play blast of the full animation:

Once I had finished with the animation itself, I roughly textured the obstacle course to suit my character (Emily from Corpse Bride). I also roughly textured the character to suggest that it is Emily.

Below is a textured play blast of the full animation:

Looking at my animation positively, I feel I was able to get the character to look like Emily in terms of movements and textures. I also didn't have an 'abundance' of issues with the Norman Rig yet i still had some.

As far as negatives go however, I did have quite a few issues with the automatic inbetweens and the way the rig disliked me moving the feet high up (the leg would bend in all sorts of strange ways, so I found it difficult to create exaggerated poses due to this issue). Maya also crashed all the time as my laptop mustn't have been powerful enough to keep up, and due to this I had to re do allot due to forgetting to save regularly enough (towards the end this wasn't too bad as I was saving every few key frames). Another issue having to do with my laptop was that it wasn't strong enough to play through the animation in Maya, and so I had to play blast all the time to be able to see how the animation was going in terms of fluidity and timing.

Example of how Maya would badly calculate inbetweens

If I were to create this again, I would probably spend more time on making the animation as seamless and possible, however as I am clearly a novice I was not able to make it any more seamless than it is shown above. However in truth, I wont be animating characters again if I don't have to as it is not the discipline I want to become my career.