End of holidays

Over the Easter holidays I did use this time to relax, but also used this time wisely. Second week of holiday was reserved for me going on work experience to The Joint, a small Post Production company, which was great I might add. I then continued working on animating Anja’s paper cranes.

I started by creating a curve. I did this from the Top view in Maya so that the line will be created aligned in that view. Theoretically this should mean that when a model is attached to the curve as a motion path it will always move along the line aligned along with the Top View. Or in other words if a model is attached to it then the model should be standing upwards correctly.

I turns out this isn’t the case at all. Below shows some mages of my attempts to attach a model to the curve as a motion path.

In case it would skrew up the fish somehow I decided to test it on a separate model of an arrow created of equal size to the fish.

When attached to the curve it seemed to rotate 90 degrees. It was in fact facing the right direction though.

After a while of experimentation I worked out that these settings enabled the model to be properly connected to the motion path.

I then attempted to add the fish to the curve by selecting the fish’s main controller and adding it to the curve as a motion path. Unfortunately this error occurred. I wasn’t entirely sure what this meant so I tried deleting history to see if it made a difference.

Low and behold it worked! The fish is now attached to the motion path. Although now it decided not to attach inline with the curve like the arrow did.

I borrowed a Rig from Moe from his film to test on a motion path and it attached correctly. I looked in the menu and it turns out ‘World Type’ should be set to ‘Object Rotation Up’

I then finally got the fish on the curve correctly. To test I recreated a curve that had been projected onto a bumped surface. As the picture shows the fish follows the motion path straight over the bump as it should.

Unfortunately again, after getting it working and animating the body on the line the main scene file didn't import the new reference. So instead I imported it again and repositioned them.

I also tried to texture the fish too as Anja asked me too. Here is an example of a UV of the fish’s fin and how i added the texture.

It’s a bit tricky to do as bits such as this can often happen.

This is the fin finished.

And the whole fish. I decided to texture it from a Japanese Yen note. I found an image on an old Yen note that would suit the period and place that our film is based from.

click for better picture

And below is a playblast of the finished animation...