Maya Final Project

 Watch this- then read about how I did it.


SIZE Distortion from christopher robert on Vimeo.


So this last semester at Weber State University I enrolled in a new Maya class that they were offering. This class was a trial class to test out the curriculum, how effective, and popular it would be to start some type of animation program at WSU. I absolutely loved the class. It was for 6hrs. on Fridays, but I enjoyed every minute of it. During the sememster we went through the whole process of designing a short animation in Maya.

I first came up with the Character roughs I wanted to design in the program, scanned them in to start modeling them.

Then with shapes and modeling tools in Maya I was able to create it into a character and color it. Most of the semester we spent learning how to manipulate and transform shapes into the things we wanted to create. This can be a very long process in that creating detail takes tons of time. This part only took me about 3hrs since I tried to keep my character basic.

Next was the animating. Since I had a pretty cool character I figured that duplicating him and creating different sizes and playing around with their reaction would make for a pretty good video. I came up with the concept, wrote a storyboard and then had to start the animation process.
The key was taking this character and rigging joints, bones, and connections of all the different parts so it would move in the correct way. Then after that is correct there is the part of taking each leg, moving it to where you want it in each frame and controlling every movement of this character while still trying to make it look natural and alive. It's very hard for the character to not look too stiff..
I first animated the main spydor by without any of the little ones. Then I animated all the little spydors in and added the big mama at the end. Animating for my final project was well over 15 hrs. That is really long for a one and a half min video.

Once the animation was finished of course I wanted to make it even cooler by adding in my own special effects. This process was probably the hardest part for me. Taking this animation and bringing it to life with visual effects and sound really was a challenge. I basically had to create/take all these different videos of separate pieces of lasers, explosions (smoke, fire, light, debris, burn marks, dust, rubble) and combine them with the right timing, coloring, and layering to make it look real. It took a lot of trial and error since I haven't worked with explosions before. So there was a lot of self teaching involved, but it was so worth it.
I made it even more difficult on myself because I wanted a glass/mirror reflective ground in the animation, so after I finished each explosion, I would have to re-create it as a reflection on the floor.
I did all the effects in After Effects CS5 and it took about 14 hours to do it all and there were over 200 different layers put together to form all the different effects of the explosions, lasers, and reflections.

The audio is what really brought this animation to life. I found different fire/explosions sounds online in which I mixed several different kinds for each explosion, but the tinkering of the walking spydors was recorded with knifes on a mirror, and the other robot squeaking noises of their legs bending was made with an open stapler. ha ha. It was time consuming putting in all the different sounds of the feet. Putting in the music and sound effects took me about 4 hrs.

Here is the final product. It took me over 40hrs to do it, but learning the software was sooo much longer. Enjoy it. Comment and let me know what you think.


SIZE Distortion from christopher robert on Vimeo.