Easter Week 1-Creating ident 2 part 1

This is the final part of animation I need to complete before completing my project. To begin I imported the robot, bear, balloons and bag into the park scene. I then scaled them into proportion by setting the coordinates before positioning them in the scene. In this part of ident 2 the robot will be carrying the bear in the bag, so I positioned and scaled the robot followed by his bag. To get the bear to fit in the bag I did need to use the bones to reposition the limbs and scale him slightly further.

When I was happy with the size of these objects I grouped them together. I then rescaled the timeline to 60 frames in length.

Next I turned on auto key to animate half of a step of the robots walk, this being the movement of his leg from behind him to in front of him. I did this as I planned to cycle the movement using the ping pong parameter out-of-range type as I felt this would work best as I would not need to align the start and end point. When animating I started with the upper leg and then modified the movement of the lower part.

Afterwards I opened the curve editor and set the cycle to ping pong so that the steps were constant for each bone animated. I then repeated the process for the other leg.

Next I used auto key again to set the start and end points for the walk so land was covered as his legs were moved. I then placed him in the scene exactly where I wanted him.

At this point I watched the animation and felt he looked rigid as he walked. So I animated his arms as he walked. To do this I created the arm movement for half a step with auto key and then applied a ping pong cycle using the curve editor. I did this for the upper arm and then made his arm bend at different amounts by rotating the lower arm bone.

After this I applied movement to his head as he walked to help to prevent this rigid look. For this I used the rotate tool and auto key to move his head from side to side.

I then watched the animation and realised the robot moved too fast and it looked like he was skiing. To improve this I made the distance he travelled shorter.

I then set the shot using the target camera. I initially placed the camera so the shot only included robot and bench, but I felt this looked quite boring and as it would be the first part of this animation I wanted to set the scene. So I moved it away from the subject so it included some of the play equipment.

Next I added omni lights to the scene. I set the move coordinates to place it in the same point of the scene as in other animations for this ident. I set the intensity to 1 and turned on the shadows. This left the subject quite dark and so I added a target spot light to highlight the subject and set the intensity to 0.4 so it lights the subject to a good level. This left a circle of light on the floor and so I turned on the far attenuation and set it between 80 and 600.

I was quite happy with the animation at this point but felt the balloon in the backgrounds did not work as they were stationary throughout. I used auto key and the rotate tool to add animation to each balloon separately. To make it look as realistic as possible I tried to get them to sway in sink, but not to have their movements identical.

When doing this I found I needed to move the pivot points to the bottom of the string as the movement would come from the tied area. Finally I used the curve editor to identify big changes in movement and reduce these as they were only meant to be moving in a gentle breeze.

I am happy with this and so I will leave this now. I will now go back to my first animations and see if I can improve these now my skills have improved.