For this project we had to create a personality for a character, and make it react to an object that entered a room. We did this in Autodesk’s 3D modeling program called Maya, using professional character rigs for our characters as we didn’t learn how to rig in Maya.
This process proved to be very frustrating, but very fun at the same time. When we were creating a walk cycle with our character’s rig, Maya crashed on us multiple times. (Over 30 times total for a six person class within 3 days)
The actual project was very fun to model, but when it came time to animate the character it became frustrating and time consuming. It is very tedious to animate and make sure everything flows smoothly. To help minimize this issue, we only animated what we could see on camera.
When it came time to render, we encountered EVEN MORE problems. The render farm that we had set up in the beginning of the year still wasn’t working, textures weren’t showing up correctly when rendered, or objects were disappearing. This lead to some late night and frustrated groans. 🙂 It took 12 hours to render five frames at one point! We found a solution to help shorten the rendering time for each frame, but is still going to take a very very long time.
My favorite part of this project was modeling the objects and texturing when it worked.
Unfortunately, I do not have the finished Action-Reaction Scene as of right now. Once it is finished rendering and I have edited it, I will put it up. 🙂