Join George Maestri for an in-depth discussion in this video Scene overview, part of Animating Cartoon Characters in Maya.
- Now before we get started, let's take a look at the animation that we're going to do in this course. This is the final version of this animation. Now typically when you animate, you start with an idea or maybe a storyboard. This started as kind of a series of thumbnails here. So these are some thumbnail sketches that I did. And this all kind of turned into this quick scene. Now this scene has a couple of basic parts. The character enters, he notices something, he reacts to that, and then he exits the scene.
So this is a pretty standard little animation here. So let's go ahead and play this. So let's go through this just a little bit more. So when we animate, there are a number of different ways to animate. One is called straight ahead where you just start animating the next frame in the sequence. The other is called pose to pose where you create major poses for the character and then you work in between those. So we're going to work between both of these methods. Now at the beginning, we're going to animate this walk kind of as a straight ahead sort of animation and then the character's going to squash.
Okay so this gives a little bit more cartooniness. And then he's going to leap in the air, stretch, and now at this point, he's going to start animating pose to pose so we're going to have one main pose here, which transitions into another main pose here, another pose, and then one more, and then he's out of there. So as you can see, this has a lot of different techniques that we can use. So let's go ahead and dive in and get started with animating this shot.
- Working out the walk timing
- Blocking out footsteps
- Animating the character's walk
- Animating a jump, including the landing and follow-through
- Blocking out and timing poses
- Creating facial expressions
- Animating a quick exit
- Adding lights
- Rendering in Maya