Low Man
I had difficulty deciding whether or not I should include the low man. I had difficulty placing the low man in the correct position to serve the ball. At first I decided to scratch the low man idea and focus on modeling the gym but I had extra time left until the project was due so I modeled the gym and then added the low man. The concept of the animation was inspired by Americas funniest Home Videos' clips. The low man serves the ball just to have it come back and hit him on the head. When I imported the low man file into my gym scene, I noticed that the low man was much larger than my gym. I had to re-scale the entire gym to fit the low man. This included the bleachers, the net, the ball, the walls and the gym floor. This experience taught me a very valuable lesson. When modeling, it's important to group objects together or make many objects into one mesh. Re selecting every piece of my models was a challenge. I am glad that every object I made was stored in its own separate Maya file. I just combined every object, re scaled it and then imported them back to the gym.
When I was rendering the animation, I accidentally chose the wrong camera view. It worked in my favor. Originally the animation was suppose to look like this.
After rendering it came out like this.
Rendering with mental ray made the walls appear reflective. The camera angle is awkward but with the reflective walls it makes it seem like a fun house. I added sound affects to emphasize when the low man served the ball and when he gets hit. I used the default light settings.
Creating UV'S
This was a new experience for me. I chose not to model the scoreboard because it's in the background. It didn't need much detail. I tried to put together rectangle planes to make the wooden floor but it came out horribly. I found an image of a scoreboard and a wooden floor to use. I had difficulty figuring out how to map the images over the object proportionately. I had to read a lot of forums until I found out about the automatic mapping tool and plane too. I was able o use these two tools to fix the floor and score board. They came out best when i rendered them using mental ray.
Self Evaluation
I use to think that animating took more computer skill than art skill. This class proved me wrong. You do need some prior computer knowledge but its mostly art. I also learned the different aspects of animating. I didn't know that so much went into creating some of my favorite movies like Toy Story. For my final project I used the tools and skills I've been learning about to create the gym and low man clip. After seeing the tour of the gym I am realizing that I should have included more pictures on the wall to make it really look like a gym.
I would still like to improve in lighting, modeling and recording with the camera. Overall I am proud of the work I've done this semester. Maya was an unfamiliar program to me at the beginning of the semester and already I've started creating my own animations.
