My final project is an expansion of my midterm project - a simpler version of Luxo Jr., the animated lamp in the Pixar promo (hence the title "Pixar-lite). This edited project focuses more on cinematography and animation, as the lamp model itself is pretty simple. In the weeks since the midterm, I refined the model and elaborated the set, but most importantly, rigged the lamp to a joint skeleton and achieved the realistic bouncing animation I originally intended.I made the lamp base, lamp head and lightbulb using NURBS CV curves, and the lamp post using NURBS primitives
. I placed a point light in center of the bulb to create the effect of it illuminating in all directions. Then, the hard part. I struggled for close to eight hours attempting to apply CV deformers and wondering why on earth the pieces were either scattering apart or deforming to the point of being unrecognizable before successfully grouping the lamp's individual parts together and rigging it to a simple three-part joint skeleton (pictured far right from four angles) and IK Handle (near right) to duplicate the effec
t of the lamppost bending and snapping at its center hinge.
. I placed a point light in center of the bulb to create the effect of it illuminating in all directions. Then, the hard part. I struggled for close to eight hours attempting to apply CV deformers and wondering why on earth the pieces were either scattering apart or deforming to the point of being unrecognizable before successfully grouping the lamp's individual parts together and rigging it to a simple three-part joint skeleton (pictured far right from four angles) and IK Handle (near right) to duplicate the effec
t of the lamppost bending and snapping at its center hinge.After slightly elaborating the existing set by adding two more blue Phong planes to act as "walls" and a NURBS primitive cube (to which I applied a "Shatter" effect to jazz up its basic gray appearance) to act as a platform for Luxo Jr. Jr.., I was ready to animate. I used the principles of forward kinematics to animate the lamp making three short, shallow jumps across the floor before launching itself onto the platform and making one final small jump before settling into place - I then attempted to make the "bouncing" motion more realistic by reverting to "Persp/Graph" mode, clicking the "Translate Y" channels for the "Joint 1" lamp group and the IK handle, selecting all the points and pressing the "Linear Tangents" button. The total animation time is 400 frames. (from top to bottom: first frame, "bending into itself" frame, "jump-launching" frame, last frame)
This project certainly has room for improvement - the lamp's launching motion as it jumps onto the platform is a bit "float-y" and I had trouble animating individual parts of the figure. However, I'm pretty happy with how the project turned out - I especially like the realism of the lamp bouncing forward on the floor and how the light shines on the walls as it does so. As someone who has zero animation, modeling or cinematography experience (and little tech experience in general), the course material was frustrating at times (WWIII: me vs. Maya), but overall it was interesting to take a class so out of my element, and has sparked my interest in further exploring the intricacies of 3-D animation in the future. Also, when I tried rendering the animation, it looked like this:
I'm not exactly sure how to remedy this problem, so my final project is represented by a simple Maya binary file.
