Telling Tales: Let's Get Animating!

Well this morning has been great.

I started by importing my character into the environment, made sure the character was scaled appropriately against the sofa (which I ended up remodelling as I was unhappy with the shape) and began animating one of my designated scenes. I thought I'd start with one of the scenes were the child pulls itself up against the sofa and attempts walking away from it. I had managed to animate a good couple of seconds when Maya decided it didn't want to work anymore and I lost my work. You'll now realise that my first sentence was sarcasm.

I angrily took an early lunch break and made sure to move to a different computer once I had done as I seemed to be having reoccurring issues with the one that I was at. I NEED to remember to keep saving in future.
When starting fresh in the afternoon, rather than race ahead on my own, I thought it would be best to set up a scene file that me and Emma could work from. The scene would include both the characters and props, all positioned and scaled correctly so that this will be consistent across all of our scenes. The same goes for the material attributes of all said objects as well as the render settings.

Remodelled Sofa and Added Building Bricks

Modelled Table and Book

Whilst I was waiting for Emma to finish her character so I could begin animating again, I thought I'd test making some textures for some of the objects to create a little bit of contrast between them and the background and some of the larger props. The book cover is definitely going to be an important object to have a texture, as one of the scenes will focus on the cover to enhance the narrative and explain what is happening in the story, so I started with that one. 

Book Texture

Toy Block Texture

It turns out that Emma has been having trouble with UV mapping her character. When she tries to unwrap her model to make a UV snapshot the model breaks and no longer works as an animated rig. So we have decided to import the character untextured so we can get started with animating, and see what we can do about this problem at the end. It may have to be a post-production job if it doesn't work.

Scene File With All Components 

 

Layers for Different Characters and Components

Now we're ready to get started, let's do this!