Today I revisited my dialogue performance animation and started to fill in the gaps. I spent a short time filling in key details just for Maya to crash and I had to start over. On the start over I remembered to save often. I noticed that my key-frames were out of place because when setting out the key poses I had the frame counter at 24fps instead of 25fps. I had to go into the graph editor and fix all of these and align them up properly again. After this I was ready to animate, I had problems with the rotation key-frames because I had set them up previously to default back to 0. This meant Buckid kept glitching out and not moving properly. I again fixed all of this by rotating his body parts past 360 and setting the key-frames ahead so they didn’t get back to zero. I also polished up the first movements up to about half way and added some anticipation. You can see the video of me creating this stage under!
I also had another go at filling in some gaps this time around I had made it a lot easier for myself. I went back and cleaned up parts in which I hadn’t noticed needed doing before along with adding some cleaner movements over the middle of the animation. Another thing in which I did was to go through the rest of the important key-frames up-to the end and set the rotation points correctly beforehand so that when I reach that point I have less work to do and also I wont get confused with random body parts moving out of place. The video of me creating this stage can be found under!
The following day I came back to this animation with a clear mind and carried on with polishing off my work. I went through the beginning again tackling any issues which I saw and anything which I could improve on. Following this I started finalizing the last few seconds of the animation by correcting Buckids movements. I had to reassign some of the key-frames so that he doesn’t flip out randomly which took a while. Once done I went through and adjusted timings and realism through the graph editor. This took me to the end of the animation. During these tasks I have started to use the graph editor a lot more and it has allowed me to pick up more skills and get my animations to a better standard overall. The video to me creating this part can be found under!
Overall I found this task to be quite tricky, when first tackling it I though it would be quite simple but when animating I didn’t realize how hard the timings and syncing with the audio track would be. I decided to animate Buckid to the first audio track of what I depicted it as someone showing off their Kung-Fu. I had Buckid doing his fancy moves and looking quite insane but having him fail at the end, I did all this as best as I could in-time with the audio. What went well for me was that I attempted new movements with the rig which I had never touched on or probably never would have touched on if not chosen that specific sound track. What I think was bad about the experience was that the audio track I chose didn’t have much talking in it so I didn’t portray Buckid very well in that aspect but only through the noises he made. It was an effective task which had overall improved my skills on timings within Maya while animating. If I have more time I will go back through the animation and perfect the movements to allow smoother transitions along with the sound to have it matching seamlessly and flowing nicely. I could even reattempt this whole animation with a different sound file to see how I get on if I have the time towards it. If this plan arose again I would make sure to include all waiting times within my key pose setups so when I go to animating it will allow me to have a much easier experience than doing it with everything already in place and then needing to create the space therefore disrupting the whole animation. But overall I enjoyed the dialogue performance animation task.
The video for my dialogue performance animation can be found under!
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