3D Animation 2
For year 1's final animation task we had to produce an animation using any method where a character interacts with an object. I chose 3D animation as I had the best experience with it in the past and found it easier than the others.
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I chose to have my character lift a barbell, and used the model provided in the last 3D animation task. For my reference footage I used the following YouTube video. While it isn't standard reference footage I found that it had a lot of different angles on the deadlift and I found it useful.
To start with, I made a simple barbell model in Maya using cylinders. I then pasted this model into the 3D rig scene.
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I then created the first frame of the animation. The plan was to have the character squat, bring the bar down and then return to the original position. I scaled the barbell to fit with the character model, then adjusted the arms and fingers using the controllers and the attribute editor.​
I used the controller around the hips to bring the character down into a squat. This was the first instance of a prevalent issue: the hat and hair did not follow the rest of the model when the head was moved. This was a bit of a pain as I had to separately animate the hat to keep it attached.
Moving the components into place, I straightened the arms downwards and placed the bar in the character's hands. I had to edit the finger placement in the attribute editor to get them in the correct position. I moved the eyes down to follow the movement so that they didn't roll back into the head when the character bent down.
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To finish off, I simply copied and pasted the first frame along the timeline to have the character return to that position. The hat was an issue throughout and I had to use multiple keyframes to keep it in place. This wasn't completely successful as the hat bobs around a bit during the animation.
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Overall I am happy with how it turned out. It doesn't look too unnatural and it is timed relatively well. Some improvements could be to make the hat look cleaner and potentially add some facial expressions, though I wasn't sure how to do that without it looking strange.