Week 9-Applying the finishing touches to ident 2 part 3

The main thing I have left to do for this part of the ident is to make the legs move during the key frames where the robots whole body moves from the balloons to the bear. To do this I used the auto key and animated the movement of the top bone in the leg. I started by working on one leg and then repeated the process for the other, alternating his legs positions to add realism.

I felt the walking motion did not look quite right at this point and so I added animation to the bottom half of the legs. Before starting this I watched a person walk and tried to create this movement. For this I also used the auto key and placed key frames at the same point as the upper part of the leg.

When I watched this it did not look quite right so I made some alterations to improve the animation. This was especially the case where the robot stopped as this originally looked quite awkward.

Afterwards I used the auto key to animate the arm movement as the robot walked. I used a similar process to what I used for the legs, but making sure the left arm points forwards as the left leg points backwards and the same for the right arm and leg.

Next I tried to change the expression of the robots face as the bear floated away. I wanted him to have a scared and upset expression as this is the emotion which I thought he would be feeling. For this I selected the rotate tool and used the auto key to set the smile into a frown between frames 47 and 52, the time when Ted starts to float away.

When watched the mouth spun around in a circle before reaching the end position. Therefore I added extra key frames in between to get the rotation of mouth I wanted.

I then watched this again and found it moved up the face as the expression changed. As a result I also added extra key frames for movement using the move tool.

The animation of the robot was now complete so I went on to add lighting to the scene. To start I chose the omni light and placed it in the sky above the scene. To position it properly I used the coordinates to place it in the same position as in other parts of ident 2 which are already complete. I set the intensity to 1 and added shadows.

When rendered a lot of the subject was in shadow and so I added a target spot light and placed it in the scene facing the subject matter. To get the light level I wanted set the intensity to 0.5. This left an obvious ring of light around the subject and so I used far attenuation between the values of 80 and 800 to remove this.

Afterwards I added a target camera to make sure I could get the exact viewpoint I wanted when I rendered the animation. I tried to get the bench central in the shot and only include the section of the scene where the animation occurs.

Then I considered the animation as a whole. When looking at this I felt the two balloons in the background did not work as they were stationary throughout. Therefore I felt slight animation of these objects would benefit it greatly.

To begin I moved the pivot points of each balloon to the base of the string as I wanted this to stay in the same place throughout the animation. Then I turned on auto key and used the rotate tool to create some movement of the balloons, as thought they were blowing in the wind.

I am reasonably pleased with the outcome of this section of the ident. The walking section is too quick when rendered as this took longer than I thought it would and therefore when planning the animation did not leave enough allotted time. Other than this it went well.