Completed animation
To start my animation I opened the maya file from my desktop and checked if there was any previous animation tied to the rig, In this case their was, so I opened the graph editor and cleared it all out. This way the model would go back to the starting T-pose and allow me to animate it myself without any difficulty. This also means i'm not using someone else's work.
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The First animation I wanted to attempt was the sitting down and standing up as it was the first on my story board. To create this I first had to move the model from its T pose into a more natural starting point. I kept this in my animation as I felt I wanted my animation to show my process as I created it. The first 300 frames are just me moving the arms to get a gist of how the movement speed looks.
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After the arms are sorted out, I made the character sit
down, by first crouching then spreading his legs out.
Since this is my first time animating a full character, it doesn't look very natural. For the secondary animation here, I moved the characters arms to his head to make him look like hes in pain. I did this as I wasn't very sure what to do with the arms.
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Since he was in this position I decided here on a wim to make him "scream" to the sky since it looked like it would follow well. This however
wasn't in the storyboard and was something I added as
I was working on it as an addition.
I decided to leave it in as it was part of my
experimenting which makes the project a little bit more
interesting to watch.
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The next part of my animation was to return to the storyboard and put the model into a more natural sitting position. To create a more natural sitting pose I asked my little brother to sit on the floor for me to use a reference.
This is the pose he came up with. Once the model was
this pose I then had to figure out how to get him to stand
back up.
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Getting the model to stand back up was quite difficult,
and quite troubling, due to this it doesn't look natural.
Every time I personally tried to get up from this pose, I
found that I couldn't actually do it without leaning on
something or having someone pull me up. This may be because of the way my body is personally or just because of how hard it is to get up from this pose. Either way the animation doesn't look great here and would need a lot more experimentation to create a more natural look.
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Once my character was standing again, it was time to attempt the dreaded walk cycle. I have never been great at doing walk cycles even in 2D which is my specialism which is likely due to the fact I tend to walk in a strange way and have weak knees. While creating my walk sequence I wanted to give it a bit of personality, so I decided to model it after a more camp person for this one. (Camp is a way to refer to a specific kind of person, normally one who is Flamboyant and effeminate).
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Next up on my list was my attempt at a jump. I wanted to make it look good so I tried to include a lot of hesitation to make it more prominent, however i think this ruined it as I made the whole jump too slow. I couldn't figure out how to change where each frame was, so I left it alone as an example of how not to make a jump. I decided to recreate a jump the correct way once I was finished doing the other parts I wanted to do.
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The next part of my animation was another attempt at a walk cycle
this time with the character looking around for something. While
the walk cycle is the same as before, there is less hip swinging, as
this one isnt meant to be "camp" the main focus of this one is the
head movement and arm movement, the legs are less important as
they are roughly the same as before.
after that I attempted to make him dance, as a lot of the animations
I looked at for my inspirations were dances, it made a lot of sense
to attempt one. Since at the time, I had been watching 'Welcome to
the ballroom' which is a japanese anime about ballroom dancing,
I decided to try making him do the waltz, however, it didn't go very
well. While the hand position was correct, I couldn't recreated the
steps for the waltz in maya with my limited knowledge. This ended
up making the animation look messy. Thinking about it, I could have
Tried to make an easier dance rather than a waltz.
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after I finished the waltz I made the character do the generic pose
for proposing. I chose to add this here as ballroom dancing is a very
formal thing. So it felt like it flowed quite naturally.
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The hands wouldn'd do exactly what I wanted them to do here,
but I left it this way as did not want to break the model again.
The only things left to do with this animation was to create another
jump as I wasn't fond of my first one and add another walk cycle,
this time a very plain one as proof that I could create one.
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I added a background and a floor using standard planes from the
poly modeling tab in maya to make it stand out more.
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After I completed that it was time to render.
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render settings.
The render took about 30 Mins on my home pc, and rendered at a frame per 0.01 seconds. It was super quick because it was at the bare minimum of info on the screen due to the low detail of the model.
Graph once i finished animating.
Completed animation
To start my animation I opened the maya file from my desktop and checked if there was any previous animation tied to the rig, In this case their was, so I opened the graph editor and cleared it all out. The animation I had to clear out this time, were my tests, which can be seen at the bottom of the page.
This is the flat pose of the giraffe and how I started out.
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The first task I did was making the giraffe walk. This was difficult as quadruped animation is something I have never tried in 3D or 2D. Since I focus more on humanoid stuff.
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To create the walk cycle I had a video reference up to recreate the steps. The giraffes steps were staggered, which made it hard to create a perfect sync for the rendered out version when compiling the video.
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To create the walk I started by positioning the feet where I needed them, Starting on the left side, then moving to the right side. Because of the staggering, I had to change the frames I was looking at when working on the back legs, when I was copying the movement from the front.
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To make it more realistic, I added animation to the hips as they swing when a giraffe walk due to them having to shift their weight as they are very heavy creature.
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Once I had finalised the walk cycle, I saved it as walk, then saved it as the Run file, as I was going to start working on that.
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For the run cycle, the front and back legs move differently from walking, The front legs move at the same time and the back legs move slightly after it, making the giraffe look like its going to fall over.
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To compensate that the back has to move down and its moving, which still looks kinda silly.
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After I had completed the run, I save it and then reopened the walk file to make my final file. The Eating file.
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To make the eating animation, I started with the walk I had before, and moved the Giraffe near the tree, and moved it closer as it did its walk. once it had finished the walk, I moved the legs into a standing position and moved the neck and head around, similarly to how giraffes move them in real life, However, I chose to not make this super accurate as to exaggerate the movement.
All that was left to do was save and render the scenes out, Using the same settings.
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Once Rendered, I compiled them in Adobe After Effects to create the video.