wk 5: Heads, shoulders, knees and toes, yep they're all animated.

A fews things to cover in this post, firstly I have been experimenting with path constraints because getting my character to tumble down a cliff took aaaaaages getting the keyframes looking smooth and accurate and doing that all again but for loads of rocks did not seem appealing so I thought I would venture into the world of path constraints.

Firstly I created all of my rocks out of a box which I altered with the help of some noise and edit poly modifiers and materials. Then I created a line and by using Refine to add point, and by convert the points to Bezier corners I used the point handles to make the bounce convincing and sharp when the object hits the mountainside. Then I highlighted the rock and went to Animate/constraints/path constraint. A dotted line appears and you drag that to the path and the rock snaps to the path and automatically keyframes an animation for you. This turned out to be much faster than individually keyframing each movement and spending hours in the curve editor getting the curves to the right speed.



Below is a little taster of what the finished article will look like. I did this quick render by going to Animate/Make preview.



In scene 9&10 Drew is slightly annoyed about having just fallen off a cliff to portray his annoyance I animated 10 parts of his body, those being:

Left arm
Right arm
Moustache
Beard
Left eye
Right eye
Left eyebrow
Right eyebrow
Drew's skin
Drew's body

Each part has been animated separately whether its to shake, wobble, rotate or fade, I think that together they all converge to achieve a working animation.



As an aside project we were asked to follow a tutorial which used FFD boxes to modify and shape eyes. Below is my character with a rather enquiring look on his face! The tutorial of how to do this is at www.infinitee-designs.com.