Today I recieved the work back from my second years as it was the deadline day. I gathered all of the running loop animations I had ready for me and placed them all into a seperate folder titled ‘Runs’. With this folder I opened up my ready to go Maya scene which had all of the characters in their poses from the first part of the scene. From here I placed the running loop versions in their places. I made sure to extend the scene to 1000 frames as this section was going to be 40 seconds long.
From here I copied the running loops across the whole timeline so that the characters were constantly running throughout the whole section. I moved over to Zobbol and Zooma next and placed their keyframes around the course at different intervals as they were going to be running at a constant pace throughout. With those 2 finished I moved over to the main characters and started to place their keyframes accordingly.
Using my full animatic as guidance I added the specific camera angles and character interaction throughout the scene. I also added new shots which I thought would pick up the race well and effectively. My final addition onto this scene was a slow motion shot as the characters passed over the finish line in tandem. This amplified the effect of them finishing neck and neck and the effort that they were both putting in. Afterwards we see them run out of the stadium to where it meets onto my scene 3.
A little error during this work session was that Maya crashed again and I hadn’t saved in abotu 15 minutes so all of that work was lost and I had to recreate it. All this did was remind me that I needed to save often when animating large and long sequences within this software. Finally, I rendered the scene out and placed the individual shots into a Premiere file where the scene was made into a movie file.
Overall I am really happy with how this scene section turned out, I was dredding doing it as I knew it was going to be one of the hardest and most time consuming parts to carry out but thankfully I completed it with little to no errors occurring for me.
Animation Blog 