For this animation I came up with the story of a normal, mature adult man that is probably going to work. Because of his imagination, the whole situation becomes a game of 'floor is lava' and so he tries to avoid every crack in the sidewalk. For a moment he becomes a Shaolin (in his imagination) and beats the obstacle course, only to find out in the end that he was acting like a kid and he was standing out too much.
And so, even from the beginning I had to come up with two models for the legs.
Before I started to make the concept drawings I tried to get a more in depth look at how the legs work so I studied the anatomy:
The following concept drawings for the Shaolin outfit were featuring a loose part for the pants, which created problems while bending the legs and I wanted to animate by using nCloth in Maya, to get a more realistic feeling. I ran into many problems, like the fact that nCloth has to let the material 'rest' in order to get in a neutral position, and the surfaces were poking trough each other. The whole process proved to be too difficult and too demanding to get good results, so in the end I decided to modify the legs.
The new version allowed the legs to bend without creating too many problems.
During the research part I also drew some poses that could be used in the animation. The fact that this animation was about a Shaolin helped me in finding a lot of research material. I found many step-by-step tutorials on Youtube on how to do many of the moves that will appear in the animation and also I could get a lot of references from movies and even the animated show Avatar: The Last Airbender.
0 comments:
Post a Comment