Keyframing is a basic technique for computer animation where the character's position in each "key" frame is set manually. Although this technique is straightforward, generating the right movements can be difficult. This assignment is an introduction to computer animation using keyframing.

The command line: /usr/aw/maya/bin/maya can be used to start up Maya from an SGI machine in the SGI lab. Maya will also be available in the NT Clusters soon. The current versions of Maya are 1.5 but 2.5 will be installed soon. Maya2.5 will be able to load Maya1.5 files.

Online documentation for Maya can be reached from a web browser by opening the Help Menu in Maya.

If you have any trouble running Maya or need help, please contact the TA:

Keyframing

In /net/hn41/animation/models/bugs you will find three models:

mom_model
baby_model
toy_bug

Your job is to animate the mom_model with a natural set of behaviors by moving its body, head, arms, and legs. You may use the other two models, but you are not required to. Your animation should be between 5 to 10 seconds long.

Although the default lighting and scenery will be satisfactory, feel free to add to your animation as you see fit. Props can be added, too. Maya provides many options in terms of shading, modeling, lighting and cameras.

Note that rendering may take some time so plan ahead. For example, a 5 second clip with default rendering settings will take about 2.5 hours.

Minimum Required Motions:

1) pick up the feet and walk
2) look around or look at objects.
3) move arms and hands.

Additional Motions:

We encourage you to animate some additional movements.

1) flapping wings
2) twisting the upper body
3) wiggling the lower body
4) rotating the eyes
5) blinking the eyes
6) moving the antenna

Be creative!! The outlined motions are just examples of what is possible.

What to hand in

For the assignment, you should turn in a quicktime movie file. The command below will transform a sequence of images, "imagefile.*.rgb", to a quicktime file "outfile.mov":

dmconvert -v -f qt -p video,rate=30,comp=qt_anim imagefile.*.rgb outfile.mov

The images should be rendered using Maya in SGI format at 360x243 resolution. Store your final images and movie file in your /net/hn41/cs4496/ or /net/hn41/cs7496/ directory.

You should play your movie file before you turn it in to be sure that the conversion worked. The movieplayer program is

/usr/sbin/movieplayer outfile.mov

You can look at individual images from the command line using:

/usr/sbin/ipaste imagefile.0001.rgb

Grading will be broken down as follows:

animation of lower body 25%
animation of upper body 25%
use of props 25%
extra effort 15%
lighting and rendering 10%