4 Poses With Eleven

In this assignment, we were supposed to use the Maya character rig called ' Eleven ' and take rendered shots of him in 4 different poses, showing emotion.

For this first shot, he is in a sinister pose, rubbing his hands and plotting something evil. However the squated legs depict a certain sense of childishness and innocence in him:

In the second shot, he is in a joyful pose, like a ballet dancer in mid air.

In the third shot, he is in a horrified and shocked state, as if he just at that moment lost something precious to him.

For this fourth pose, he is in a very condescending pose. Bewildered at the same time, as if he is listening to a person who he thinks is speaking absolute nonsense.

In this assignment I learnt quite a bit about how to operate character rigs in Maya and how their various features can be easily controlled through the channel box.

Bouncing Ball In Maya

For this assignment, we were supposed to animate a ball bouncing in Maya.

Eleven Pushing A Block

Here I have animated the ' Eleven ' character rig that were given for our Maya assignments. I have animated Eleven pushing a large block. I wanted to make the block look it was heavy, so I first animated Eleven's movements, and then animated the movement of the block. I gave Eleven some head movements to make it look like he was putting quite a bit of effort into pushing the block.

Eleven Picking Up a Block

We were given a Maya character rig called ' Eleven ', and in this project we were supposed to make him pick up an object from the ground. I made the character pick up a simple grey block from the ground. I went through problems in this assignment because an error had caused the textures of the character to go haywire, so I had to re-texture the character's skin and hair. I was also unable to texture the eyes and so in this animation his eyes are black.

Burt Walk Cycle

This was one of our Maya assignments, where we were given a character rig called ' Burt ' and we had to make him walk. This was the first time I was animating a character within Maya and so I found it difficult to animate the foot placements, foot and toe roll, etc. I made Burt walk on a checker textured plane to give the viewer a sense of the distance covered by Burt. 

Flash Sound Project

For this project we were given a sound clip and we were supposed to come up with an animation that we could mix the sound clip with and that would give the sound clip some context. The sound clip contained all sorts of strange noises and a scream at the end. I decided to animate a cafeteria scene, because I felt the sound effects in the audio clip matches some of the things that go on in a cafeteria really well. A customer's burping, the chef chopping vegetables in his station could associate well with the snapping sound effect in the clip, a receptionist speaking into the phone, the splashing sound effect in the clip could be the sound of another customer drinking from a nearby water fountain. And of course the alien, mumbling the word " hello " while slowly creeping up on the receptionist, causing her to drop the phone and scream in terror.

Cubey Emotion 2

In this assignment we had to animate Cubey along with another character. Either one of the characters takes on a more dominant role while the other one takes on a submissive role. The story behind my animation was: Cubey is painting something on an easel, and the smaller character comes rushing into the scene in a joyful mood, and bumps Cubey in a playful manner, causing Cubey's hand to move and create an unwanted mark on the canvas. The moment he bumps Cubey, he realizes his mistake. Cubey gets frustrated, pointing at his painting and becomes furious. The smaller character gets scared at this point. Cubey then intimidates and makes the smaller character walk backwards to the other end of the frame. The smaller character then becomes sad, as Cubey tells him to go away. This entire scenario is very identical to the common situation of a child interrupting his father while he is working, and the father then getting agitated and telling his son to go to his room, and that was the inspiration for this scene. I used symbols such as the exclamation mark on top of Cubey's head, the smoke that comes out of his ears and the lines around his head to emphasize his anger and irritation. To show the sadness of the little character, I animated his back bending, and then him slowly walking out of the frame. I made a few mistakes in this animation, like how the paint on the canvas still shows when Cubey's head is supposed to be in front of it.

Cubey Jump

In this assignment we animated a cube-like character (Cubey), jumping from point A to point B. This was one of my early assignments and I made the mistake of drawing in too many frames, making the animation look very shaky.

Bouncing Balls in Flash

This was our first Flash assignment on the course. We had to animate a football bouncing and a bowling ball bouncing. I used the squash and stretch element for both the balls, but to a much lesser extent for the bowling ball to show its rigidity and heaviness.

Cubey Emotion

This was a Flash assignment that we were given in which we have to animate a cube-like character (Cubey), reacting to a sudden noise. Cubey first had to stand in a calm and confident pose, and we then had to decide how Cubey will react to the sound. I chose to animate how Cubey would react to the sound of a UFO and its tractor beam. For the first pose, I drew Cubey standing straight with a puffed up chest to show his confidence. Then he hears the sound, gets alarmed and immediately turns to look in the direction of the sound. He soon realizes the UFO's presence and begins to panic and run back and forth. In desperation, he starts hopping on the spot, crying for help even though he knows no one is around to help. He then see's the UFO coming closer to him and he runs as fast as he can to get away from it.

 I used two classic 2D animation elements here such as the tiny dust clouds on the ground when Cubey skidded to a halt during his manic running, and the lines around his head to denote his emotion of being alarmed.