janinamajcher-blog - Tumblr blog

janinamajcher-blog · 5 years

Link

Link to video on youtube.

0 notes

janinamajcher-blog · 5 years

Text

Evaluation of the process in creating and animating character in 3DS MAX

The main task of this assignment was to create a short animation with the character that we earlier created, that was supposed to be the alter ego of our very first character designed in the first term.

First of all it took me a long time to decide how I wanted my final version of the character to look like. I wasn’t happy with my earliest drafts, so before I started work on my character with the software, I did a lot of different drawings. After that I started to draw the movement of the character. My main inspiration for this character and animation came from Tim Burton’s movies, since I associated with his art a lot. The emphasized eyes, small lips and very pale skin was mostly influenced by my favourite childhood movies. The first personality that comes to my mind, that could be similar to my character is Coraline. Short hair, very slim, tall posture and the square shape of the head is all very comparable, but the personality of my character is completely opposite to that of Coraline.

Later I started my work by creating a poly head in the 3DS MAX software. It took me a long time to remind myself of all the tools, but after some time I managed to form my character’s head. The next step was to create her eyeballs, flat circles around her eyes and her lips. After that I found youtube tutorials with which I managed to shape her hair. At this point most of the work on poly head was finished so I decided to move on to forming her body. From that point I was building boxes and then shaping them by moving vertexes. It would be difficult to create it without the help of my reference drawings that I could see in the background. After forming the body I smoothed over both the head and the body. Then I used vertexpaint from the modify list and coloured her clothing and lips. The next stage presented a lot of problems since I couldn’t attach the body and the head without changing their colours automatically. Later I managed to do the ringing and I could finally start my animation. Since my character has a very characteristic, slim posture and look, I decided to animate something that shows my character’s skills to dance. I did not want her to be a simple ballerina dancer so I decided to add some additional poses. To help myself with creating movements I watched many dance videos on youtube. I was animating with autokey and with every 30 frames I was creating one still movement. I especially struggled a lot when I had to rotate the character. After finishing my animation, I started to work on lighting and creating a room in the background. The final step was to render the animation.

In future I would like to improve a lot of things, but would like to mainly focus on character detail design. I believe that one day I will manage to make my character more realistic with the help of specific tools. I also want to learn more about texturing and to animate in a more efficient way, since, it took me a lot of time. I find it especially important to make animation itself much more smoother. While working on this character I had many issues with making the movements a bit more natural, but at the same time I wanted them to be a little exaggerated. What I find tricky is also creating dresses or longer hair and then animating that since I am not sure how that would react to the movement in each frame. What I also find important is to learn to not to use references with movement process, but to already have this idea in my head, so that I could automatically imagine specific movements. The other important thing that comes to my mind is to learn to collaborate with different characters.

I think that all of these software helped me a lot to improve my skills in computers, graphic design and to create my first animation, which I had never done before in my first year at the University of Greenwich.

Throughout this project I learnt a lot about 3DS MAX and animation. With the help of youtube and moodle tutorials I managed to create my own short animation. I am looking forward to continue my work with this software and also Maya in the future.

0 notes

janinamajcher-blog · 5 years

Video