from Computer Arts
Inspired by the best of Japanese toy design, these characters are just waiting to entertain you. Bring them to life in suitable style with 3D World’s guide to the fundamentals of keyframe animation In this tutorial, we’ll be showing you how to bring to life two simple but effective characters inspired by the style of classic Japanese toy design – and in the process providing a guide to the fundamentals of keyframe animation.
The animation is only five seconds long, so we had to think carefully about how to communicate the moods of the characters. The short narrative sees our sad, blue character, RainBot, suddenly spotting a rainbow and being transformed into a happy, bouncy bot. A small black character, UndergroundTot, wants to know what’s happened and eagerly tries to copy RainBot’s bounces to find out. Over the next three pages, we will explore how to recreate UndergroundTot’s movements. His shape suggested that he’d move quite slowly, so that was a given; but by animating his antennae, we could also give him a suitably inquisitive look.
For the purposes of the walkthrough, we’re going to assume that you understand how keyframe animation works, and have some familiarity with the Maya interface, but nothing more. We’ll be showing you where to set keys, how to use the Graph Editor to manipulate animation curves, and how to set up secondary motion: the way that other parts of the character wag and jiggle as he bounces up and down. As a finale, we’ll explore how to animate RainBot’s antennae using Bend deformers, and how to keyframe shaders as a quick way of animating a character’s eyes. Scene files corresponding to each stage of the walkthrough can be found online: if you get stuck, load the next one in and start from there.
Click here to download the tutorial for free from Computer Arts (pdf)
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