It was a slow day today.Back to college so the time was spent in class.
Animation
(1) We looked at Adobe’s Fuse and Mixamo software online.
With the Mixamo animation, for our fairy movements, there is a “Flying” pre-set. So I applied it to my willing character “Stefanie”.
There are 4/5 elements of the animation you can control with this type. Arm, legs, no.of frames, level of awareness….The level of awareness for me, was the coolest. It means you can decide how much looking around the character does. It really gave life to the character as well as the Arm lowering. I don’t understand why it involves having the fist clenched – unless its an angry fairy!
I asked our lecturer about our fairy in the project and how would we change this animation for our purpose. He advised to create a separate rig for the fairy’s wings and then attach the wings rig to the character rig.
(2) Playing with Fuse, Mixamo & Maya – Fuse is a fantastic tool for creating character rigs complete with weight binding and texturing. It is very impressive and I am looking forward to exporting and importing it into Maya. Our lecturer showed us how he created a character in Fuse, exported as .ogg. Then uploaded to Mixamo. Applied an walking animation. Then exported as an fbx to Maya. Pretty incredible and the animation is very lifelike with a nicely made mesh.
We also experimented with the Quick Rig tool within Maya.
Audio
We had an Audio specific class tonight which was apt timing given my recent post.
Primarily we looked at the Zoom Device, Audacity and Reaper. Reaper was the newest thing to me and I have to say, got me very excited. I could not get used to Audacity and Maya for an assignment we had last semester – it was literally a case of playblasting and adding in sound to the final render. Painstakingly slow and not specific to frames. One of the classmates rendered with Blender and used the Audio tool within it to finetune. I am not sure how this was possible during the initial stages; I used it to final render alright. (Maya and audio are a no-go)
So my tasks are to :
- Check out the Character rigging within Fuse, Mixamo and Maya
- Create a simple rig that is not human relatad, and try attaching to a simply animated character
- Download and check out the Reaper Software and re-edit my older Animation assignments to see how much better they could be
- Play with the plug-ins in Reaper to see how they compare with Logic Pro X
….That’s all from me. Happy Tuesday 🙂