Animations, whether they are in movies, television, or video games, would not capture the viewer’s interest if they were not accompanied by music. Music can set the tone for a scene and is generally added after the animation has been completed. It takes a large amount of work to coordinate a piece of music with a final animation, especially when specific movements must occur at certain times in the song. This paper describes a method of automatically synthesizing an animation that synchronizes with the input music. Our system allows the user to choose a piece of music and a character and outputs a synchronized animation that expresses the emotion and intent of the music through movement.
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This tutorial is intended to teach new animation students a few basic animation techniques and workflow based on fundamental animation principles using Maya and a free character setup named walkingBall_v2.3 created by the author. This character setup or “rig” has many useful features without being overwhelming to newer students. This tutorial assumes you have a basic understanding of how to navigate the Maya interface, find menu commands, and other basic computer file management skills.
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It is easy to take computer graphics for granted nowadays. More and more are we seeing products of multimedia technology that includes 3D Animations. The creative and economical use of 3D animation can be evidenced in many of the released animated features like games or movies. Backgrounds, camera moves, crowd scenes, and machines of all descriptions have been modeled and animated digitally. 3D companies are striving to improve the entertainment value of their products. The images created with these tools will become more and more sophisticated with each passing year.
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In this beginners guide we discuss how to build a simple humanoid character and how to animate it. It was not our intention to give a step-by-step guide on how to build a character and how to animate it, because there is extensive amount of literature available on this. This guide can be used next to the “Learning Maya 5 Foundation” book as a source for more information and explanation. We found that although the book is very clear on what actions to do and what the actions will result in, it lacked somewhat in explaining the meaning of concepts and the reasons for performing actions.
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hen creating animations, you should be very careful what you do with the FloorRef. When walking or running, the character should stay at a constant height from the FloorRef object. When jumping, the Character should increase it’s distance from the FloorRef object to give the appearance of translation away from the floor. Characters should ALSO have a “stationary root” that only moves relative to the floor reference (e.g. for walking, jumping etc.) but that does not move constantly (i.e. in an idle animation the root should not move). This is very important if you wish to use your Characters with the Virtools Mulituser Pack, or the dead reckoning algorithm used for predicting distributed objects will not work correctly.
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This document is intended to be a guide or a reference for those who, using Maya to create their characters, want to export them into the Quake III Arena engine. It’s based on our experience at the Virtual World of Art (VWA) where we wanted to create our own avatars for our environments, and reflects as well some particularities due to the specific needs of our project, that might not be the same of the average user willing to create boths for the game. We just use Quake III Arena as an engine for a very different context than what the game itself is about, but I think that it can be a useful reference nevertheless for those Quake III Arena enthusiasts that, using already Maya to model, texture and animate their characters, would like to see them fighting in Quake III Arena.
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This 3D Quick Start Guide is designed for the multimedia designer who is new to the 3D capabilities of Director® Shockwave® Studio and the 3D artist/animator who is unfamiliar with Director® 8.5 Shockwave® Studio. Our goal today is to animate an American-style football player, kicking the ball over the goal post. This character was created in 3ds max™ 4 and animated using character studio® 3, proven software solutions from Discreet. You will find a number of assets in the .zip file. By the end of this tutorial, you will be able to take these assets into Director 8.5 Shockwave Studio and create an interactive 3D sequence, playable on the web. The player is kicking the ball over the goal post. The character is animated to perform a series of motions in sequence along a single timeline, i.e., an idle motion, a jog start, a kick sequence, a sprint with arms up and a jog stop. The football is animated to leave its start position, fly over the goal and bounce on the other side. The goal is to take these assets into Director Shockwave Studio and to make them interactive.
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Using After Effects to composite image sequences rendered from Maya opens up a large number of possibilities and offers flexibility that is hard to achieve using Maya alone. While on the one hand a little extra work, foresight, and some knowledge of After Effects is required, the payoff for the additional effort is usually worth it. You don’t need to master every aspect of After Effects to take advantage of this workflow. A few simple tricks and techniques can add a lot of life and character to your animation. The techniques described in this tutorial are the same techniques used in design houses when creating animations for the entertainment industry.
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